This misinterpretation wasn’t just the product of one man’s overactive imagination. Mellaart probably took inspiration from the late Victorian anthropologist James George Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, who hinted that pre-Christian societies may have worshipped a mother goddess. Robert Graves built on Frazer’s work in the 1940s with a wildly popular book called The White Goddess, which argued that European and Middle Eastern mythologies all came from a primal cult devoted to a goddess who governed birth, love, and death. Graves’ work electrified anthropologists and the general public. As a result, people of Mellaart’s generation were primed to see ancient civilizations through the lens of goddess worship. Few scholars questioned his interpretation. Meanwhile, celebrated urban historians Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs were quick to embrace the idea that Mellaart had finally discovered the remains of a civilization that thrived in a time before humans had rejected female power.
Mellaart went far beyond Frazer’s and Graves’ claims about goddess worship by suggesting Çatalhöyük was an ancient matriarchy where women ruled over men. And that claim had to do with Mellaart’s ideas about sex. There was something about the imposing nudes he’d discovered that struck him as odd: none of them seemed to have genitals. Instead, their bodies were thick and strong, flanked by fierce animals. They were the opposite of the soft, eroticized centerfold models in Playboy, an iconic “gentleman’s magazine” that Mellaart certainly would have encountered in the 1950s and ’60s. Mellaart decided that a male-dominated society would never produce female figures like the ones he’d found because they didn’t cater to “male impulse and desire.”7 Only a matriarchy could produce nonsexual figurines of naked women, he concluded.
Mellaart’s largely unfounded hypothesis went viral when his findings were published in the US magazine Archaeology, complete with several pages of lavish photographs. The Daily Telegraph and Illustrated London News also covered his finds enthusiastically. The previously unknown site in Anatolia became a popular sensation, helped by dramatic pictures of the “lost city” whose residents were so strange that women had ruled over men! Since then, Mellaart’s unfounded claim about goddess worship has persisted for decades. It’s often the only thing that people know about Çatalhöyük. The idea of a lost goddess-worshipping civilization in central Turkey has even found its way into new-age beliefs and inspirational videos on YouTube.
Today in the archaeology community, Mellaart’s ideas are received with extreme skepticism. Though he deserves plenty of credit for identifying Çatalhöyük as a rich archaeological resource, his interpretations of its culture are contradicted by loads of evidence that researchers have discovered since the 1980s.
If Çatalhöyük wasn’t a matriarchy of goddess-worshippers, then how should we interpret those female figures? Lynn Meskell, a Stanford archaeologist who has analyzed Çatalhöyük figurines across the site, believes that Mellaart and his contemporaries misinterpreted them partly because they didn’t have the context provided by looking at the site in its entirety. Now that we have data from 25 years of continuous excavation, it turns out that these female figurines tell a more complicated story. First of all, women and human figures generally represent a small number of figurines compared to animals and body parts. At Dido’s house, for example, archaeologist Carolyn Nakamura8 counted 141 figurines, and of these 54 were animal figurines while only 5 were fully human ones. An additional 23 represented human body parts, like hands. Other houses in the city show a similar ratio, with animals a far more popular subject than humans of all types. If any type of symbol held sway over this community, it was more likely to be a leopard than a woman.
The other thing that Mellaart got wrong about the importance of female figurines was how they were used in everyday life. Molded quickly from local clay, baked dry in the sun or lightly fired, they were clearly not put on a shelf to be admired or worshipped.9 Worn down and chipped from frequent handling, these figurines look like they might have been carried around in pockets or bags. Archaeologists usually find them in trash piles or jammed between the walls of two buildings. Occasionally they’re buried in the floor, much like those memento bones and shells in Dido’s house. It’s hard to imagine people treating objects of worship so casually, tossing them out rather than placing them reverentially in wall displays the way they did their ancestors’ skulls.
Meskell muses that these figurines “may have operated not in some separate sphere of ‘religion’ … but, rather, in the practice and negotiation of everyday life.”10 Dido’s people may not have had a notion of religion as we know it, and thus would not have worshipped a “fertility goddess.” Instead, Dido might have engaged in small, everyday spiritual acts similar to those we see in animism, where spirits reside in all things rather than a handful of powerful deities. The figurines themselves may not have been objects of reverence, but the act of creating it could have been a magic ritual. Seeking guidance or good fortune, Dido would quickly mold one from the clay next to the field where she harvested wheat. Once it was dry, she could have used it in a ritual that drained its power away. Afterward, she’d throw the clay figure off her roof along with waste from yesterday’s meal. If people at Çatalhöyük used the female figures like this, it’s clear why people threw them away so often. Making them was more important than keeping them.
Another possibility is that these figures represented revered village elders, women who reached the age Dido had by the time she died. Meskell points out that no two figures are exactly alike, and most have sagging breasts and bellies that suggest age rather than fertility. Perhaps when Dido and her neighbors made these figures, they were calling on the power of specific female ancestors rather than some abstract magical force. Some activities or events in Dido’s culture may have required the aid of a powerful woman. Still, this practice doesn’t suggest a matriarchy. We know the plastered human skulls at Çatalhöyük, revered and passed from hand to hand, came from men and women in roughly equal numbers.11 It doesn’t appear that one gender was privileged over the other, at least if we consider the way skulls were preserved.
UC Berkeley archaeologist Rosemary Joyce, who revolutionized the field with her work on gender in early societies, argues that we can’t be sure female figurines would have been regarded as representing women as a group. She writes:
Even a figurine with abundant detail that allows us today to say “this is an image of a woman” might have been identified originally as an image of a specific person, living or dead, or as the personification of an abstract concept—like the representation of Liberty as a woman—or even as a representation of a category of people, such as elders or youths, unified by some feature we overlook today when we divide images by the sexual features that are so important in modern identity.12
Joyce points out that it’s easy to project our modern understanding of gender onto ancient peoples—which means we are always looking for ways that one gender might have dominated the other. That’s exactly what Mellaart did. Instead, we have to be open to the possibility that the people of Çatalhöyük divided their social world up using other categories, like young and old, farmer and toolmaker, wild and domestic, or human and nonhuman animal.
Domestic technologies
Women’s real-life jobs at Çatalhöyük were hardly magical. Based on material evidence from the city, as well as comparisons with other traditional societies, anthropologists believe that women were in charge of farming and domestic work, while men hunted and crafted. Obviously there was a lot of overlap between these two spheres of work, and some people would have defied their given roles. What’s certain is that neither form of labor was easy. When Wendy Matthews conducted a study of microlayers of plaster on the floors in Dido’s home,13 she was able to measure quantities of dust that accumulated on the floor, as well as typical patterns of tidying up. At Dido’s home and elsewhere in the city, she found that residents kept their houses swept clean, raked ashes out of their hearth stoves regularly, and painted the walls and floor with fresh whit
e plaster almost monthly. In some houses, plastering also meant replicating elaborate ochre wall art with each layer. Çatalhöyük’s denizens replastered so often that archaeologists have found up to 100 layers of paint on interior walls.14 This deep cleaning must have been necessary because the only chimney was through the door in the ceiling. Dido’s dung-and-wood-fueled fire probably coated the walls in soot—and gave her black lung, to boot.
But all this maintenance wasn’t just the Neolithic version of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. It was also a way of designating specialized spaces in cramped quarters. Çatalhöyük residents created at least two different kinds of plaster to use on the floor: a bright white, lime-based mix covered the north side of the house with its bed and burial platforms, while a reddish-brown mix covered the south side devoted to the hearth, toolmaking, weaving, and other household jobs. We see this north/south pattern replicated everywhere in the city for hundreds of years, leading some archaeologists to surmise that residents divided their homes into “dirty” and “clean” areas. The dirty area was for the hearth, with its smoke, ash, and refuse; the clean area was for the bed platforms and adult burials.
Domestic labor was a combination of craft and engineering; everything in the house had to be handmade. Floors were completely covered in soft, woven reed mats, whose complex patterns left distinct impressions in the plaster that archaeologists can see thousands of years later. Based on the number of mouse bones that archaeologists find in homes at Çatalhöyük, we know they had a major pest problem, so Dido’s family would have woven reed containers to keep hungry rodents out of their grain. They also made nets and clothing, which meant starting by making a textile from leather or plant materials, and then carving bones into needles to sew it. Sheep rib bones became paddles, which they used to smooth the clay for their cooking pots. They had rooftop workshops for making knives and projectile points from both flint and obsidian; they carved fish hooks; they built bricked-in stone hearths to cook what they had hunted and gathered. And by the way, they made the bricks, too. Every aspect of homemaking would have required this family to be experts in a wide range of areas.
Because tools were so difficult to make, Dido’s family also did a lot of recycling. Throughout the city, archaeologists have found knives and axes that had been extensively repaired, their blades sharpened repeatedly. In Dido’s house, many bone tools had been reformed and repurposed after breaking. And of course the family constantly needed to repair their house, not to mention the oven. They rebuilt their clay oven at least twice, moving it to a different location in the process. Even animal dung was reused as fuel. Çatalhöyük was made almost entirely of materials that people today would call sustainable. In fact, the city was founded in a marshy area that was rich with soft clay, ideal for brick-making, plaster production—and fashioning a quick figurine for whatever spells you might need to cast that day.
Perhaps the highest form of clay-based technology developed at Çatalhöyük was used for cooking. When the city was founded, people cooked by putting heated clay balls into baskets with their soups and stews. This was a labor-intensive process in which the chef had to keep pulling out the colder balls and replacing them with piping-hot ones fresh from the hearth fire. By the time Dido’s family lived in the city, however, artisans had developed a tempered clay that was ideal for thin, strong cooking pots. Now cooking was as simple as putting a pot over the fire and letting it simmer. No more juggling pot-boiler rocks. As Rana Özbal told me, “When your cooking technology changes—it’s like suddenly having a car. It changes social relations. Less people are going to be involved in the cooking process. Transferring hot stones would be labor intensive. It’s not easy. If you can put your pot on the stove, you can be doing other things while that’s happening.” That innovation left time in the day for work that was more creative, like making wall paintings or carving bone beads. It also gave people an opportunity to specialize in different tasks, like learning to make several varieties of plaster.
Assuming that everyone in Dido’s family was able to do a few more tasks thanks to those high-tech cooking pots, even more elaborate kinds of crafts became possible. One person could be freed up to go on a two-day journey to the mountains to gather obsidian at the nearest quarry. Obsidian was akin to a luxury good during the Neolithic, prized for its strong, sharp cutting edges and reflective surface. Getting more obsidian meant more raw material for skillful stone knappers, who fashioned knives by carefully striking one stone with another, flaking off bits until a blade emerged.
Farmers also needed time to perfect their agricultural expertise. Çatalhöyük’s two mounds rose out of a swamp, and the river between them flooded seasonally. During rainy season in the summer, the city would have looked like an island in the middle of a muddy landscape pocked with pools. That meant the city’s farmers had to plant crops at some distance from the city, on land that stayed dry. Özbal said that there’s no doubt the people of the city were accomplished farmers; we have ample evidence of domesticated wheat and other grains in storerooms, plus residues of milk from animals left in cooking pots. But, she admitted, it’s hard to say where people were plowing the land and keeping livestock. She and other researchers speculate it could have been in foothills nearby, a lengthy walk from the city. Farmers probably spent part of the year away from home to care for the fields, perhaps working in shifts. Shepherds and goatherds would have roamed far from the city, too.
Farming is another example of what becomes possible when a large population comes together. Dido’s family could spare a few members to work their farmland and tend animals for extended periods of time because they had enough people back home, with decent ceramic technology. Farming sustained the city, and the city enabled farming. This reciprocal relationship is where urbanism was born; Dido would have viewed agriculture as part of city life, not in opposition to it. Urbanism emerges roughly as the same time as agriculture.15 Farms are essentially a specialist approach to the gathering of plants done by nomads.
The benefits of specialization might be one reason why Neolithic people flocked to Çatalhöyük, despite the fact that city life was labor intensive and quite different from what most people were used to. Villagers might have been drawn to the idea of a society that was full of expert craftspeople. A practiced brick-maker produces bricks that last longer; a dedicated goatherd means your flock can be bigger. Someone who makes figurines of animals all the time can produce detailed, creative leopard icons. There probably weren’t any ex-nomads arriving in the city with dreams of becoming celebrity flint knappers. But urbanization did mean everyone’s house could be packed with complex tools, along with foods that would have been hard to come by in a village of 100 people. As Çatalhöyük grew, it may have attracted new residents with the promise of abundance: more people meant higher-quality items to share and swap.
Though it was full of tradespeople, Çatalhöyük was not some kind of proto-capitalist society. Residents certainly exchanged many valued objects, but the city’s relative abundance didn’t lead to the production of surplus goods for some at the expense of others. Çatalhöyük’s settlers had not yet invented money, and there’s no evidence that certain families had vastly more property than others. Most houses were one or two rooms, roughly the size of Dido’s. People at Çatalhöyük didn’t have the space to accumulate more possessions than they needed—they simply stored enough to survive. “Abundance” meant having enough food to ward off total starvation, and shelter that was relatively stable. At Çatalhöyük, there was no opportunity to become rich, at least in the way we understand it today.
Beyond a sense of security, the city also promised cultural enrichment, a form of wealth that we can only measure indirectly in the archaeological record. We see hints of its power in the sheer ubiquity of wall art at Çatalhöyük; every house is full of drawings, figurines, and handmade furniture. But we can also extrapolate cultural complexity from the sheer size of the city’s footprint, where thousands of people interacted with one ano
ther every day. Someone who was skilled at making figurines in a nomadic group might never meet another person with a comparable ability. But in Çatalhöyük there would be several, comparing notes and swapping stories, developing more advanced techniques by working together. In short, the city allowed people to form attachments that went beyond family. City dwellers had opportunities to socialize with other people who shared their interests, as well as the ones who shared their hearths.
People today are attracted to cities because they feel an affinity for subcultures or groups that don’t exist in smaller communities organized mostly around families. Çatalhöyük may have drawn new residents for similar reasons. Ian Hodder describes a curious practice that hints at one way people memorialized their nonfamily bonds. Many of Dido’s neighbors built what he calls “history houses.” These houses had a larger-than-average number of plastered bull heads, paintings, and bones in their walls. And these dwellings were carefully rebuilt with the exact same dimensions many times over centuries.16 People would even exhume and rebury the skeletons that had been placed in the floor of the earlier house, and archaeologists sometimes find dozens of skeletons in the floor of a history house. Like museums or libraries, history houses were places where the people of Çatalhöyük maintained a shared repository of cultural memories.
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