Çatalhöyük is a Neolithic settlement mound, enclosing the remains of a honeycomb of mud brick buildings, built side by side and one on top of the other for a thousand years, starting around 9000 years ago. Then, as today, there is no proto-typical, individual household, or house. Avoiding such generalizations, the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük (BACH) learn as much as possible about individual residents or particular artifacts and use this knowledge to create rich, multivocal and multi-scalar descriptions and histories of place. From 1997 to 2003, the BACH team focused their attention on excavating the life-history of a single building and three separate small cells adjoining it. Termed Building 3, this 400 square foot mud brick structure was likely home to several generations of a Neolithic family. Excavations of Building 3 revealed painted walls, a collapsed roof, burials beneath the floor, and many structural modifications providing intriguing clues clues to its life and that of its occupants. A magnificent flint dagger with a carved bone handle was found in one of the adjacent cells. The BACH team invites you to explore the data and use your imagination to create your own story of life in this household 9000 years ago. To view the project's website, please see: http://okapi.berkeley.edu/remixing.
An aerial view of the East Mound at Çatalhöyük, looking towards the north. This photograph was taken from a balloon flying above the mound. The original Mellaart excavation (called the South area) can be seen in the left of the picture. The North area, opened in 1995, including the white shelter of the BACH area, lies at the top of the picture. The guardhouse and the archaeologists' compound is in the top left corner of the picture, including the road leading west to the town of Cumra and east to the village of Küçükköy. In this picture you cannot see the wire fence that surrounds the East Mound.
About Çatalhöyük
Çatalhöyük is a settlement mound made up of the remains of a Neolithic farming community that lived in central Turkey more than 9,000 years ago. First excavated in the 1960s by British archaeologist James Mellaart, Çatalhöyük became famous worldwide for the dense arrangement of its buildings and its spectacular wall paintings.
After Mellaart’s initial work at the site (1961-1965), Çatalhöyük remained abandoned until archaeologist Ian Hodder (then at Cambridge University; currently at Stanford) began a new series of excavations in the 1990s. From 1997 until 2003, archaeology and media specialists from the University of California at Berkeley (aka the Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük, or “BACH” team) worked alongside scholars from around the world at Çatalhöyük. Where Mellaart’s original work exposed more than 150 houses in the settlement, the BACH team took a different approach, excavating in minute detail the remains of a single house known as Building 3. The data and discoveries from that excavation have been made available to the public through the resources in this and other websites.
