On the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey, a large mound concealed one of the most remarkable discoveries in archaeological history. Çatalhöyük — occupied from approximately 7500 to 5700 BCE — was home to up to 8,000 people at its peak, making it one of the earliest and largest Neolithic settlements ever found. What made it extraordinary was not just its size but its organisation: or rather, its apparent lack of conventional organisation. No streets. No apparent hierarchy. Houses entered through the roof. The dead buried under the living room floor.
Çatalhöyük's houses were built directly against each other with no space between them — no streets, no alleys, no lanes. The only way to move through the settlement was across the rooftops. Entry to each house was through a hole in the roof, accessed by a wooden ladder. The interiors were carefully maintained — plastered walls, painted murals, built-in platforms for sleeping and working — but indistinguishable from each other in size and quality. There is no evidence of a palace, a temple, a chief's house, or any structure that would indicate a ruling class or central authority.
This apparent egalitarianism has fascinated archaeologists and social theorists. James Mellaart, who excavated the site in the 1960s, interpreted many of the interior shrines as evidence of a goddess religion — female figurines, bull skulls mounted on walls, elaborate wall paintings. Ian Hodder's more recent excavations have complicated this picture, finding that the figurines are more diverse than originally reported and that the "shrines" may simply be ordinary houses with particularly rich contents.
Çatalhöyük challenges every assumption we make about what a city requires. No market, no temple, no palace, no street — and yet 8,000 people living together for over a thousand years. Whatever organised them, it was not the institutions we consider foundational to urban life.
— Ian Hodder, The Leopard's TaleThe most striking practice at Çatalhöyük was the burial of the dead beneath the floor of the house — specifically beneath the sleeping platforms where the living slept. Multiple generations of a household might be buried under the floor, their skulls sometimes removed after burial and plastered with clay to create portrait faces, then placed in significant locations within the house. The living slept literally above their ancestors.
This was not casual — the burials were carefully arranged, the bones sometimes rearranged and curated over generations. The house itself functioned as a kind of living archive of the family's dead, the sleeping platform as a boundary between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors. The physical intimacy with death that this implies is almost incomprehensible from a modern perspective.