Tunç Ilada stoops to pick up a pottery shard, one of many littering the ground at the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. “This is from a Roman ceramic workshop that was here nearly 2,000 years ago,” I˙lada, a tour guide, says of the shard. “But for the archaeologists working here, this is practically brand new.”
Ancient Rome indeed feels like modern history compared with the finds for which this arid, dusty site in rural central Turkey is most renowned. Beginning some 9,500 years ago, in roughly 7500 B.C., and continuing for nearly two millennia, people came together at Çatalhöyük to build hundreds of tightly clustered mud-brick houses, burying their dead beneath the floors and adorning the walls with paintings, livestock skulls and plaster reliefs. Greeks, Romans and other later cultures left evidence of their subsequent presence at the site, but it’s the Neolithic residents who have captured archaeologists’ imaginations: Now, new techniques to analyze the tantalizing clues left by these first settlers may overturn our entire notion of prehistory.
The 34-acre site, at one time inhabited by as many as 8,000 people, is among the world’s largest and best-preserved early settlements. It’s astonishingly rich in artifacts: When the first digs began in 1961, British archaeologist James Mellaart “chose his excavation area based on where wall paintings had been revealed by erosion and were just sticking up from the ground,” says current excavation director Ian Hodder. When Hodder, a former student of Mellaart’s, took over the dig in 1993, his team unearthed nearly 20,000 objects that first year through surface collection alone. And although Çatalhöyük’s first inhabitants left behind no written records or other traces of the language they spoke, artifacts suggest they were connected through trade to places as far-flung as the Red Sea and the Mediterranean coast.
Mysterious, fascinating objects are still being uncovered at Çatalhöyük. The prize of the 2015 dig season was a head modeled out of plaster and adorned with obsidian eyes. Though the site’s earliest residents are known to have applied plaster and ochre to the actual skulls of their dead, an artifact like this — found “watching over” what researchers think was a storehouse — had not been seen before.
