0.1 Remixing çatalhöyük: life histories of people, places & Things  (Page 2/3)

Çatalhöyük is marked by change as well as continuity. Some parts of life stayed the same over long periods of time, while others changed more quickly. Some of the houses are what archaeologist Ian Hodder calls“ancestral homes,”in that they were built in the exact same way as previous houses. There are some cases where such continuity is seen in the building of four consecutive houses. But some newly built houses only partially overlapped with earlier houses, and some houses—as in Building 3, where the Berkeley Archaeologists atÇatalhoyuk (BACH) team worked---were built on top of middens. Only intricate excavation can reveal such histories.

Why did people build their houses so closely together and enter from the roof? Why doesÇatalhöyük show this remarkable continuity? How did the people ofÇatalhöyük engage with their surroundings and with one another? These are some of the questions archaeologists are still trying to answer. They know, for instance, that the houses atÇatalhöyük changed over time in form and use. For example, the archaeologists have been able to discern a number of different phases of the life history of Building 3.

The BACH team believes that Building 3 went through five general phases of use and modification. Phase 1 was a long phase that started with the establishment of the building itself. In phase 2, a large crawl-hole or door in the northern part of the eastern wall was blocked. It is possible that the earliest burial, that of a baby found in the center of the house, dates to this phase. In phase 3, two small children were buried in the building. In phase 4, two small partitioning walls and a curtain or screen wall were constructed dividing the large living space into two rooms. In this phase, an adult female, two younger people, and a child were buried under the northwest platform in the larger room; an adult (probably male) was buried under the northeast platform in this same room. During phase 5a, the smaller room was completely filled in. The larger room was also abandoned after some ritual deposits had been placed in the center of the room. Phase 5b represents a disturbance of the abandoned Neolithic building by the burial of five people from the late Roman period (150­-250 AD).