CATALHOYUK - UPDATES

Other evidence we have assembled is consistent with the view that the autonomous household at Çatalhöyük was the primary social unit. In size, for instance, Çatalhöyük might have been a town, but despite taking careful samples from the surface of the mound, we have found no evidence for public spaces, administrative buildings, or elite homes or quarters.

There were no streets, and in fact the buildings were embedded in extensive midden areas piled with trash, fecal material, and rotting organic material—not at all in accord with modern sensibilities. Perhaps it is little wonder that access to the houses was along the roofs and down some stairs!

The autonomy of the Çatalhöyük household is also reflected in how rarely two buildings shared a wall: even though houses might be just a few inches apart, people built and maintained their own walls. Each house was built with bricks of distinct composition or shape. The bins in the houses suggest they all had a similar storage capacity for agricultural produce. And each house seems to have had its own hearth, oven, obsidian cache, storage rooms, work rooms, and so on, for the inhabitants’ own activities.

Yet despite the central role of the individual household, my colleagues and I see hints that Çatalhöyükans were divided into two large groups throughout most of the time it was occupied. The contour of the larger mound reveals two built-up areas, a northern one and a southern one, with a gully between them.

A possible explanation is that Çatalhöyük was an endogamous culture, or in other words, people married within the settlement. It may have been organized, as are many other traditional societies, into two intermarrying kinship groups. Surveys in the plain around Çatalhöyük have turned up earlier and later sites, but none of them seem to have flourished at the same time—further evidence that marriage was probably a local affair.

The standard house had one main room, which accommodated an oven, a burial platform, and other platforms [see illustration below]. One or more side rooms served as storerooms, kitchen, and places for other domestic tasks. The stairs from the roof entrance—perhaps made of a log with steps notched in it—led into the main room. Walls were built of mud bricks and were windowless. On average, they were 1.3 feet thick and stood eight to ten feet high. The interior walls, floors, and posts for the roof were all plastered.