Çatalhöyük and the great Neolithic towns of Anatolia
- Date
- c. 7100 – 5950 BCE
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- Anatolia (Turkey)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
On the Konya plain of central Anatolia, the East Mound of Çatalhöyük was occupied continuously for over a thousand years (c. 7100–5950 cal BCE), growing into one of the largest known Neolithic settlements, with thousands of inhabitants.
Its tightly packed mudbrick houses shared walls and had no streets; people moved across rooftops and entered homes through openings in the roof. Houses were rebuilt repeatedly on the same footprint, and the dead were buried beneath the plastered floors of the living. The absence of obvious palaces, temples or central administration has made Çatalhöyük a key test case for how large, dense human communities organised themselves before the rise of cities and states. Alongside related Anatolian towns such as Aşıklı Höyük and the earlier Pre-Pottery sites, it documents the emergence of permanent, crowded settled life, with all the new challenges of sanitation, disease, social friction and shared labour that aggregation brought. Çatalhöyük is inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains central to debates about early urbanism, egalitarian social order and household-based ritual.
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Related social & demographic events
- Farming village at Mehrgarh and the Neolithic of South Asiac. 7000 BCE
- Cattle pastoralism and early astronomy at Nabta Playa in the Green Saharac. 7500 BCE (onset; megalithic phase c. 4800 BCE)
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000–3100 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
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