[Si]
A large Neolithic tell standing on the edge of the Konya Plain near Çumra in south central Turkey. Extensive excavations have taken place in the East Mound at the site, first by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1964 and more recently since 1993 by Ian Hodder and a large international team. The East Mound covers about 13.5ha and has 20m of stratified deposits dating to between 6400 bc and 5600 bc. From at least 6300 bc Çatal Hüyük seems to have been a village of mud-brick houses, each built to a fairly standard plan with a kitchen living room and storage area spread over about 25 square metres. The houses were built against one another with no streets or courtyards in between, suggesting that access was through the roof. Built-in furniture includes benches and platforms. Some houses had painted and relief ornamentation on the walls that included bull motifs and stylized images of a human female, in some cases giving birth. Stylized bulls heads (bucrania) were on the walls of some rooms. Burials under the floor were common, those in the highly decorated houses often being accompanied by precious objects. Mellaart argued that the decorated houses were shrines, but this view is not shared by Hodder and later writers.
Economic evidence shows that cereals were cultivated and that cattle, perhaps locally domesticated, made up 90 per cent of the animal bone assemblage. Sheep and goats were hunted and may have been domesticated in the later levels. Woodworking, weaving, obsidian working, and perhaps some incipient metalworking in copper and lead are represented. The inhabitants of the settlement had extensive trading links with western Asia. Bull horns and cattle motifs have such a prominent place that they must have been highly significant in the belief systems and ideology of the population, together with the so-called ‘mother goddess’.
[Sum.: J. Mellaart, 1967, Catal Hoyuk, a Neolithic town in Anatolia. London: Thames & Hudson. I. Hodder (ed.), 1996, On the surface: Çatalhüyük 1993–95. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research]
