Çatalhöyük Comparisons to Other Sites

About Çatalhöyük Comparisons to Other Sites

Forty-nine kilometers southeast of Konya, an artificial mound rises roughly 21 meters above the wheat fields of the Konya Plain. Two excavation directors — James Mellaart from 1961 to 1965, and Ian Hodder of Stanford University from 1993 to 2018 — opened roughly five percent of Çatalhöyük's East Mound. Together they recovered the densest record of early agricultural village life that any Neolithic site has yielded. The comparison work that surrounds Çatalhöyük is therefore unusually pointed: peers are not chosen by general resemblance but by what they reveal when measured against this 18-layer stratigraphic column. The four axes below — Pre-Pottery Neolithic ritual peers in eastern Anatolia, the dense urbanism of Mohenjo-daro and Eridu, the contemporary passage-tomb tradition at Newgrange, and the goddess-and-figurine debate that links Çatalhöyük to Marija Gimbutas's broader Old Europe project — are the comparisons that have shaped how Çatalhöyük is read today.

The most consequential Anatolian comparison places Çatalhöyük (East Mound c. 7100 BCE first occupation, recalibrated by the bioarchaeology team in their 2019 PNAS report on the 2000-2008 seasons) against the older T-pillar sites in Şanlıurfa Province roughly 700 kilometers east. Göbekli Tepe, excavated under Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute from 1995 (formally as director from 2006, after Harald Hauptmann's earlier directorship phase) until his death in 2014, sits firmly in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B (c. 9600-8000 BCE), with the famous T-shaped limestone pillars of Enclosures A through D rising in stone-built circular and oval rooms. Schmidt's 2010 Documenta Praehistorica paper "Göbekli Tepe – the Stone Age Sanctuaries" (volume 37, pages 239-256) framed the site as monumental ritual architecture built before pottery, before metallurgy, and — most provocatively — before sedentary agriculture had taken hold across the region.

Karahan Tepe, the PPN sister site under Necmi Karul of Istanbul University since systematic excavations began in 2019, belongs to the same Taş Tepeler ("Stone Hills") cluster and shares the T-pillar tradition. Karul's team has uncovered rooms cut into bedrock, including a chamber with eleven phallic stelae and a sculpted human head that confirm Karahan Tepe as part of the same symbolic system as Göbekli Tepe. More than 250 T-shaped pillars and monoliths have been mapped across the site through earlier survey work, though most remain unexcavated. Together the Şanlıurfa sites bracket Çatalhöyük from the older end: by the time Çatalhöyük's earliest houses were going up around 7100 BCE, Göbekli Tepe had already been backfilled and abandoned.

The contrast sharpens at the level of building purpose. Schmidt argued the T-pillar enclosures were sanctuaries; E. B. Banning, in his 2011 Current Anthropology article "So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East," argued instead that the buildings at Göbekli Tepe may have been houses with rich symbolic content, and that the Pre-Pottery Neolithic inhabitants likely did not partition sacred from domestic. Banning's argument cuts both ways: if Göbekli Tepe's "temples" were houses, then Çatalhöyük's "houses" — with their bucrania, sub-floor burials, leopard reliefs, and replastered wall paintings — were already doing the symbolic work that Schmidt assigned to dedicated cult buildings. Hodder's reframing of certain elaborately decorated Çatalhöyük buildings as history houses (Hodder and Pels, in Hodder ed., Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, Cambridge University Press, 2010) accepted the same blurring of categories from the other side.

A second sharp point of comparison is the treatment of human skulls. At Çatalhöyük, plastered skulls have been recovered from sub-floor burials — including the well-known plastered skull held by an adult woman in Building 42, with the face carefully modeled in red ochre and white plaster. At Göbekli Tepe, Julia Gresky and colleagues published in Science Advances on June 28, 2017 ("Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult," DOI 10.1126/sciadv.1700564) three skull fragments with deep deliberate incisions cut along the sagittal axis using flint tools, plus a drilled perforation in one parietal and traces of red ochre. The Göbekli Tepe modifications are different in technique from the Levantine plastered-skull tradition at Jericho or 'Ain Ghazal — and from Çatalhöyük's plastered skulls — but the broader practice of removing, modifying, and curating crania is shared across the Anatolian and Levantine Neolithic from c. 9600 BCE down through Çatalhöyük's late levels around 5700 BCE. The comparative window suggests a long, regionally varied ancestor or trophy tradition rather than a single Neolithic religion.

Çatalhöyük is routinely called one of the earliest dense settlements in the world, and the comparison to later ancient cities exposes both what made it precocious and what kept it from becoming an urban center in the formal sense. Mohenjo-daro, excavated under John Marshall (Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India) from 1922-1927 and reported in his three-volume Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization (Probsthain, 1931), grew between c. 2500 and 1900 BCE — roughly 3,200 years after Çatalhöyük's East Mound was abandoned. Mohenjo-daro covers around 250 hectares of mounded city across a citadel and lower town, with a baked-brick grid plan, a covered drainage network, standardized brick proportions, and the Great Bath (approximately 12 by 7 meters, 2.4 meters deep) on the citadel mound. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer's Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1998) presents the city as the product of a regional civilization with shared standards across hundreds of kilometers.

Çatalhöyük is roughly 13.5 hectares on its main East Mound, less than one-eighteenth Mohenjo-daro's footprint, and packs an estimated 3,500-8,000 people into wall-to-wall mudbrick houses entered through roof openings. Craig Cessford's population analyses (in Hodder ed., Inhabiting Çatalhöyük: Reports from the 1995-99 Seasons, McDonald Institute / British Institute at Ankara, 2005) treat 3,500-8,000 as the defensible range, with the precise figure depending on building use-life and the density assumptions used. What both settlements share — and this is the comparison that has drawn the attention of political anthropologists — is the absence of a clearly identified ruling apparatus. Neither site has yielded a palace, a royal tomb, or an unambiguous administrative quarter. At Çatalhöyük no public buildings have been found at all; at Mohenjo-daro the citadel mound holds the Great Bath and a structure called the "Granary" (Marshall's label, contested by later excavators), but no royal residence has been securely identified. The sites do not reach this condition by the same route — Çatalhöyük is a village pressed into a town by sheer continuity of occupation, while Mohenjo-daro is a planned city — but together they form the strongest archaeological case that dense settlement does not require a king.

Eridu, the Sumerian "first city" of Tell Abu Shahrain, fills the gap between them in time. Fuad Safar and Seton Lloyd of the Iraqi Directorate General of Antiquities excavated Eridu from 1946 to 1949, and the full report (Safar, Mustafa, and Lloyd, Eridu, State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage, Baghdad, 1981) documented eighteen successive temple-platform levels on the same spot, conventionally numbered XVIII through I — some later analyses count seventeen distinct Ubaid-period temples within those eighteen strata — beginning as a 2 by 3 meter mudbrick room with a niche in the Ubaid period (c. 5400 BCE) and growing across more than two millennia until an Ur III platform was raised over it as the foundation for a ziggurat. Eridu's 18 superimposed temples make a striking structural rhyme with Çatalhöyük's 18 East-Mound occupation layers and with the practice — documented in Hodder's Inhabiting Çatalhöyük reports — of demolishing and rebuilding houses on the same footprint every seventy to one hundred years. Both sites concentrate ritual or ancestral attachment on a single vertical column. The difference is what's at the column: at Çatalhöyük the dead are under the floor, and the rebuilt structure is a house. At Eridu the dead are not (the Ubaid graveyard sits to the side, with around 1,000 mud-brick box graves oriented to the southeast), and the rebuilt structure is a temple. Eridu shows the moment when verticality of place becomes verticality of cult; Çatalhöyük shows the same impulse three millennia earlier, still domestic.

The comparison with Newgrange is rarely drawn in textbook surveys — Newgrange is usually paired with Maeshowe or Stonehenge — but the contrast in funerary architecture is one of the cleanest in the Neolithic record. Michael J. O'Kelly of University College Cork excavated Newgrange from 1962 to 1975. His final report, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend (Thames and Hudson, 1982), established a construction date of c. 3200 BCE, identified the roof-box that admits the rising winter-solstice sun into the rear chamber for roughly seventeen minutes around December 21, and confirmed cremated and unburnt human bone in the three chamber recesses. Newgrange is a passage tomb: a discrete piece of architecture set apart from settlement, designed to receive the dead and to perform an annual solar event that the living could witness from outside.

Çatalhöyük's burial practice is the inverse pole of the same problem. The dead were interred in flexed positions beneath the plaster floors of occupied houses — directly under the platforms where families slept, cooked, and worked. The 2019 PNAS bioarchaeology paper by Larsen, Hillson, and colleagues (Clark Spencer Larsen et al., "Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük reveals fundamental transitions in health, mobility, and lifestyle in early farmers," PNAS 116:26, 12615-12623, June 2019) reports on more than 700 burials recovered across the project. The distribution is uneven across houses: certain buildings hold dozens of interments accumulated across generations while neighboring buildings hold none, the pattern Hodder identified as evidence for "history houses" that anchored kinship or social-unit identity over time. Yet the people buried together were often not biological relatives. Eren Yaka and colleagues, in Current Biology 31:11 (April 2021), "Variable kinship patterns in Neolithic Anatolia revealed by ancient genomes," analyzed 22 newly sequenced ancient genomes from Aşıklı Höyük and Çatalhöyük and found that close genetic relatives are rare among co-buried subadults at Çatalhöyük and at the contemporary site of Barcın, while earlier sites such as Aşıklı Höyük and Boncuklu show frequent sibling and parent-offspring co-burials. The Çatalhöyük "household" is therefore a social unit, not a biological one — a finding compatible with Marin Pilloud and Larsen's earlier dental-phenotype study (American Journal of Physical Anthropology 145:4, 2011, "Official and practical kin: Inferring social and community structure from dental phenotype at Neolithic Çatalhöyük").

The architectural contrast with Newgrange tracks this. Newgrange separates the dead spatially (the tomb is not a dwelling) and temporally (the solstice event is annual, not daily). Çatalhöyük integrates the dead spatially (the floor itself is the burial surface) and continuously (the living slept above the dead every night). Both societies invested heavily in keeping the dead nearby, but they encoded the relationship in opposite architectural grammars. The comparison is also a useful corrective to claims that Neolithic Europe and Neolithic Anatolia shared a single Megalithic-Goddess-Ancestor culture: Newgrange was being built around 3200 BCE, by which point Çatalhöyük had been abandoned for roughly 2,500 years.

No comparison shapes the public reception of Çatalhöyük more than the Mother Goddess hypothesis, and no comparison cuts more sharply across modern scholarship. Mellaart's Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia (Thames and Hudson, 1967) interpreted the female figurines — most famously the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük, recovered by Mellaart in 1961 from a grain bin in a structure he labeled Shrine A.II.1, now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara — as evidence of a goddess-centered Neolithic religion. The Seated Woman is a baked-clay figurine measuring roughly 16.5 centimeters in its preserved (headless) state, depicting a heavy-bodied woman seated between two felines (often read as leopards). The current head and right arm-rest are 1960s museum reconstructions added after the original headless body was recovered. Mellaart described the figurine as a goddess giving birth on a feline-flanked throne.

Marija Gimbutas of UCLA absorbed Mellaart's reading and extended it. Her The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 7000 to 3500 BC, Myths, Legends and Cult Images (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), reissued and renamed in 1982 as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500-3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images (University of California Press) with the order of "Goddesses" and "Gods" deliberately reversed, treated Çatalhöyük as the Anatolian gateway to a wider matristic Old Europe culture spanning the Balkans and Aegean during the seventh through fourth millennia BCE. Gimbutas read the female figurines, the bird-and-snake symbolism, and the absence of weapons in her European corpus as evidence of a peaceful, goddess-honoring Neolithic that was overrun in successive waves by patriarchal Indo-European Kurgan pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe.

Hodder's project complicated this on several axes. First, the figurine assemblage from the Hodder-era excavations includes male, female, and indeterminate forms in roughly comparable proportions; the female-fertility figures Mellaart selected for publication were a subset of a more varied corpus. Second, many figurines were recovered from refuse deposits — middens and discarded fill — rather than from contexts that look like ritual veneration, which is hard to square with the idea that they were cult objects. Third, in 2016 the Hodder-led team recovered an intact, finely modeled female figurine ("the marble figurine," found in the TPC Area in the southern part of the East Mound, recovered by Arkadiusz Marciniak's team and reported in the September 2016 Stanford news release and subsequent technical publications) that confirmed at least some figurines were carefully made and intentionally deposited — but in a foundation context rather than a shrine. Lynn Meskell's work on the figurine corpus (Meskell et al., "Figured lifeworlds and depositional practices at Çatalhöyük," Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18:2, 2008) treated the figurines as embedded in everyday social practice rather than as discrete religious objects, a position consistent with Hodder's broader reframing.

The honest summary across the comparison is that Mellaart's and Gimbutas's interpretations remain widely held outside academic archaeology and partly held within it. Stephanie Meece argued in her 2006 Anatolian Studies paper ("A bird's eye view — of a leopard's spots: The Çatalhöyük 'map' and the development of cartographic representation in prehistory") that the famous so-called landscape painting Mellaart called a "town map with volcano" might be a leopard-skin pattern instead. Axel Schmitt and colleagues (PLOS ONE, January 8, 2014, "Identifying the Volcanic Eruption Depicted in a Neolithic Painting at Çatalhöyük, Central Anatolia, Turkey") used (U-Th)/He zircon geochronology to date a pumice deposit on Hasan Dağ to 8,970 ± 640 years before present, overlapping the radiocarbon dates of the Level VII context that produced the painting and offering geological support for the eruption interpretation. The Mellaart-Gimbutas synthesis is not so much falsified as partly absorbed and partly complicated: the figurines exist, the wall paintings exist, the bull skulls and leopards exist, and the question of what they meant to the people who made them remains genuinely open.

A fifth comparison is methodological rather than archaeological. The Hodder-led project introduced a documented practice of reflexive method — Hodder ed., Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Example at Çatalhöyük, McDonald Institute Monograph 28 / British Institute at Ankara Monograph No. 28, 2000 — that asked excavators to record the interpretive reasoning at the trowel's edge alongside the physical stratigraphy. The project also pushed open-access digital archiving and integrated micromorphology, archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, isotopic analysis, and from 2009 onward ancient DNA, into a single multi-site database.

The methodological influence shows up in how comparison sites have been re-excavated since. Necmi Karul's Karahan Tepe project, beginning in 2019, runs an integrated multi-disciplinary team of the kind that became normal at Çatalhöyük. Berggren, Dell'Unto, Hodder, and colleagues — "Revisiting reflexive archaeology at Çatalhöyük: integrating digital and 3D technologies at the trowel's edge," Antiquity 89:344 (2015), 433-448 — extended the original reflexive method into 3D scanning and digital workflow, and several Anatolian and Levantine projects have adopted variants. So when peer sites are compared to Çatalhöyük today, the comparison is partly with a body of standards that Çatalhöyük helped establish. That is a real but sometimes overlooked vector of influence: a site can shape what its peers look like, after the fact, by changing how excavators record what they find.

The five axes converge on a specific characterization. Çatalhöyük is the Neolithic site where the practical and the symbolic remained inside the same room — where the kitchen, the bed platform, the granary, the oven, the bull skull, the wall painting, and the burial all coexisted in a single 25-30 square meter cell that was rebuilt on its own footprint for over a thousand years. Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe show what monumental symbolic architecture looked like in the centuries before this synthesis. Mohenjo-daro and Eridu show what happens when the symbolic concentrates into separate ritual and administrative buildings while the residential fabric grows around them. Newgrange shows how the dead can be spatially set apart in a discrete monument tuned to a single annual solar event. The Gimbutas-Mellaart goddess argument shows how the figurines and bull-skull complex can be read into a continuous tradition of Neolithic religion — and how that reading runs into trouble when the full assemblage and its depositional contexts are examined. The reflexive-methodology axis shows how the site's influence extends past its own evidence into the procedures by which other sites are now read.

Each comparison adds a different vector to the same observational point: at Çatalhöyük, the household carried the weight that later societies distributed across temple, palace, and tomb. The bucrania, the leopard reliefs, the plastered skulls, the painted walls, the hearth, the burial, the granary, and the bed platform were not separate institutions but functions of a single building type that persisted, with remarkable architectural conservatism, for roughly 1,400 years. The site preserves not a civilization but the moment before that distribution — the configuration of social, ritual, and economic life immediately prior to the institutional differentiation that would define the next several thousand years of Eurasian history. The comparisons make that configuration visible by showing what it was not yet, and what other Neolithic societies, in other regions, would do differently.

Significance

The comparison work clarifies what Çatalhöyük is: not the first city, not a temple complex, not a goddess shrine, but the Neolithic site where the household carried the symbolic, ritual, and burial functions that later societies redistributed into temples, palaces, and dedicated tombs. As Ian Hodder argued in The Leopard's Tale (Thames and Hudson, 2006), Çatalhöyük's "history houses" were where ancestry and ritual continuity were anchored — a function that Newgrange's passage tomb and Eridu's 18-temple sequence later took over in different cultural registers.

The Yaka et al. 2021 ancient-DNA work in Current Biology reframes this further: the people buried under the same Çatalhöyük floors were often not biological relatives, meaning the household was a social institution before it was a kin group. That finding repositions Çatalhöyük as a site about how social units were constructed, not how families lived.

Connections

Çatalhöyük — the parent entity. This sub-page focuses on cross-site comparisons; the parent page covers the East and West Mound excavations, Mellaart's and Hodder's findings, and the wall paintings, bucrania, and burials in standalone depth.

Göbekli Tepe — the older T-pillar site whose 2017 modified-skull finds (Gresky et al., Science Advances) and Banning's 2011 "houses with symbolic content" reading reframe how we read Çatalhöyük's domestic ritual.

Karahan Tepe — the PPN sister site under Necmi Karul since 2019, part of the same Taş Tepeler cluster as Göbekli Tepe and the eastern bracket of the comparison window.

Mohenjo-daro — the Indus city excavated by Marshall in the 1920s; its 250-hectare grid plan and the absence of an identified ruler make it the best later-period peer for Çatalhöyük's non-hierarchical density.

Eridu — the Sumerian "first city" with an 18-temple vertical sequence (Safar and Lloyd, 1946-1949 excavations) that structurally mirrors Çatalhöyük's 18 East Mound occupation layers.

Newgrange — the Irish passage tomb (O'Kelly excavations 1962-1975) that encodes the opposite burial grammar from Çatalhöyük: dead set apart in a discrete chamber, annual solstice event, no domestic context.

Derinkuyu and the Underground Cities of Cappadocia — also in central Anatolia, also without surface-level streets in the conventional sense; a much later comparison for the Anatolian preference for vertical, internalized settlement plans.

Knossos — the Cretan settlement whose Neolithic levels around 7000 BCE are roughly contemporary with Çatalhöyük's middle phases, offering a control case for what early agricultural settlement looked like at the western edge of the Aegean.

Further Reading