The land around Konya in south-central Turkey is flat now, a checkerboard of wheat and barley, but 9,000 years ago it was flatter still. Nine thousand years ago there were no mounds. Today, on a map of the area, the word hoeyuek, Turkish for "mound," is all over the place. Twenty miles southeast of Konya, one of the biggest mounds of all, Catalhoyuk, rises 65 feet above the plain. If you stand on its grass-covered summit with archeologist Ian Hodder and look past the white tent that shields some of his diggers from the sun, your view is unbroken for tens of miles. Nine thousand years ago Catalhoyuk was alone in this vastness, and it had only just begun to grow. This was in the Neolithic Period, the end of the Stone Age: people had only just come down from the mountains to build one of the first large settlements on the planet.
For six summers straight, Hodder, a professor at the University of Cambridge, has brought a large team here to study the mound of ruins that is Çatalhöyük (CHAH-tahl-HU-yook). He hopes to continue for the next 19 years, until he retires. There are other sites that document the Neolithic revolution—when humans gave up a hundred thousand years of wandering to farm and begin building a civilization. But none are as rich as Çatalhöyük.
Between 7000 and 6000 B.C., as many as 10,000 people lived here in boxes of mud brick, with roofs made of wood beams and reeds. Surrounded by open space, they built a town so dense it lacked streets and doorways; the residents climbed over their neighbors’ roofs to their own and then dropped in through a hole that also served as a chimney. Just generations away from a nomadic lifestyle, they chose to live in extremely crowded conditions. No one really knows why.
In those rank and smoky houses, on white plaster walls, the people of Çatalhöyük created art, lots of art. They painted strange pictures of small men confronting outsize beasts; they molded plaster reliefs of leopards, bulls, and female breasts. Under the plaster floors they buried their dead, wrapped in shrouds and accompanied by clay rings and beads and mirrors of glassy obsidian from nearby volcanoes. For generations they lived on top of their ancestors, and then at some point—again, no one knows why—they abandoned the house. They swept it clean, they cleaned out the grain bins and even the fireplace, and they knocked down the walls. Then they built another house just like it on the ruins, and the mound grew another layer.
Hodder is not the first to dig into this mound. He heard about Çatalhöyük in the late 1960s, as a student attending lectures at the University of London. The lecturer, James Mellaart, was famous for discovering the site: he had shattered the old idea that civilization had begun only in the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land from Mesopotamia to Egypt. Mellaart’s lectures were memorable. “He was hugely enthusiastic about the past, he taught without notes, and he remembered every single carbon 14 date that came out of the Near East,” a former student, Louise Martin, recalls. Mellaart’s story of Çatalhöyük was the kind that made students want to become archeologists. But he could not take them there to dig: in 1965 he had fallen into a dispute with the Turkish government.
