Çatalhöyük packed a Neolithic city into forked tumuli
Çatalhöyük—Turkish for fork tumulus—is a vast Neolithic–Chalcolithic proto-city on Turkey’s Konya Plain that thrived from about 7500 to 5600 BCE, peaking near 7000 BCE. UNESCO listed it in July 2012. Two mounds split by a dead Çarşamba channel hold the tell.
The eastern mound covers about 12.5 hectares and rises some twenty metres, built up from thick Neolithic layers. The western mound, about 300 metres away and occupied from the Early Chalcolithic around 5600 BCE, spans roughly 8.5 hectares and stands 7.5 metres high. James Mellaart found the site in 1958 and dug there from 1961 to 1965, until a ban linked to the Dorak affair halted work until 1993.
Mellaart had opened only two trenches on the western mound. Jonathan Last and Catriona Gibson excavated there in 1998, two teams, one under Burçin Erdoğu and one under Peter Biehl and Eva Rosenstock, began in 2006, and Ali Umut Türkcan of Anadolu University now leads the work. In August 2025 Arkadiusz Marciniak’s team from Poznań announced a so-called House of the Dead, with twenty people buried beneath its floor, beside a large painted ceremonial building resting on fourteen platforms.
The Neolithic levels have yielded rare fragments of textiles, mostly burnt and from burials, and stone tools made almost entirely of obsidian: blades, flakes, points, scrapers, daggers and sickle blades. Many skeletons lay beneath house floors, often reburied. More than 2,500 lightly fired clay figurines have been found, mostly animals but 187 of them human.
The settlement consisted entirely of houses, with no obvious public buildings, though some larger rooms carry elaborate murals. Early guesses put the population at 5,000 to 7,000, but newer analysis suggests only 600 to 800 people lived on the eastern mound in a typical year between 6700 and 6500 BC. Genetic studies from 2025 point to households organised around women, passing from mother to daughter.
Source: Çatalhöyük
