Q&A for History of Mankind (26)
Downgrading the importance of Turkey's Çatalhoyuk site, Alexander the Great's greatest hit & African civilizations
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With that out of the way, we must have a look at the debate over whether the Anatolian site of Çatalhoyuk was the world’s first crowded town, or just a not very well designed village crammed with people living in the prehistoric equivalent of crowded Manhattan tenements.
This is a pretty important debate. For decades, we historians have presented Çatalhoyuk as a extremely important milestone in human prehistory (see, for example, this short, excellent video about the site). For a long time, the assumption has been that the multi-roomed, mud-brick structures clustered in a settlement spanning an area equivalent to nearly 26 U.S. football fields housed up to 10,000 people — a huge number for the era. I wrote about this place and similar sites in the Fertile Crescent, here:
Many of these places may have deserved the title of “town,” rather than village, but none was ever a true city, since they lacked the civic, public-use constructions typical of such places. The one that came closest was Çatalhoyuk, a compact, dense cluster of conjoined, mud-brick walls without food-paths or streets, where thousands of people lived in close proximity for safety and convenience, accessing their houses through holes on the rooftops with the help of wooden ladders.
Çatalhoyuk was first settled around 7100 BC and remained inhabited for about 1,200 years. It's on the Anatolian plateau, just outside of the traditional boundaries of the Fertile Crescent, 270 kilometers west of Göbekli Tepe, 200 kilometers northwest of Jerf el Ahmar. Its relative isolation may have contributed to the defensive, enclosed nature of the town.
Residents in Çatalhoyuk painted their walls with murals showing men with erect penises, hunting scenes and images of vultures, as well as the world's oldest landscape painting – a view of the town with the nearby twin mountains of Hasan in the background. They adorned their houses with bulls' heads and figurines, including those of women like the Venus-like Seated Woman, depicting a corpulent Mother Goddess in the process of giving birth while sitting on her throne. They wore pendants with human teeth, probably their enemies'. They made mirrors from obsidian, and daggers with exquisitely carved bone handles. They had shrines in some rooms, but their rituals were entwined with their domestic activities, in the cramped conditions of the town.
Even though thousands lived cheek-to-cheek there, it's not clear that Çatalhoyuk was a farming town with fields outside of the perimeter at least during its first few centuries of habitation, since very little grinding equipment has been found in the houses. It's more likely that locals came together over time in this region precisely because it was out of the way and thus contained an abundance of wild plants and wild game such as deer.
Horses were hunted occasionally by Çatalhoyuk residents, as well as those of Pinarbaşi, and other nearby villages. Most were Equus Hydruntinus (now extinct) or Equus Hemionus (onagers), both ass-like equids smaller than horses. Only a few bones are large enough to qualify as possible horses. Later, as wild game became scarce, domestic sheep and goats, cereals and legumes came to have a larger role in the town's life.
Çatalhoyuk is a strongly egalitarian place, indeed, one that reeks of a hunter-gatherer ideology that eschewed the social stratification, the differences between farmers, warriors and priests, common in towns further south: its houses were all about the same size and with the same design, and contained very similar implements.
Calculations of Çatalhoyuk’s population have always been contentious, but the latest paper to look at the issue really goes for a low, low figure. In fact, the site may have averaged only between 600 and 800 people during its heyday, according to the estimates cited in “How many people lived in the world’s earliest villages? Reconsidering community size and population pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük,” by Ian Kuijt & Arkadiusz Marciniak (Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Vol. 74, June 2024).
The authors argue that earlier population estimates typically calculated that Çatalhoyuk buildings crowded closely together were constructed at the same time, with all dwellings simultaneously occupied over at least several generations, which they see as a mistaken assumption – and also one that has contributed to inflate population estimates at comparable sites.
Are Kuijt and Marciniak right? I don’t think so. They may have a point that 10,000 people really is too much for a site this size, given the extremely primitive technology of the era, and the fact that not all multi-room “apartments” were always occupied. But their own calculations assume that most of those “apartments” were empty at any given time, which makes no sense at a time with no ownership registers.
Typically, if a family moved away, then one of the neighboring families would take their space, because there was no reason not to. Would you be crowded someplace if you had no reason to be? I wouldn’t, unless there were strong reasons — religious reasons, perhaps — to keep places vacant for other people expected to return, or for their spirits or whatever. And we have no idea whether that was the case.
All in all, I don’t think that Kuijt and Marciniak have yet made a compelling enough case to change earlier assumptions about the population at Çatalhoyuk.
Now for the questions by paying subscribers, on Africa’s ancient civilizations, the history of child molestation and Alexander the Great’s greatest battle:
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