Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  But they were also physical embodiments of the kinds of groups that people formed after meeting on the sidewalk and developing obsidian tech together—or hanging out down by the river, selecting the right clay for bricks. History houses might have grown out of shared interests—whether in flint knapping or something more spiritual—and a connection to the city itself. For new arrivals to the city, especially those without kin, these kinds of social groups would have made it possible to stay. They probably helped the city keep growing, too. People might move to Çatalhöyük because they’d heard it was a place for communities similar to what psychologists today call chosen families.17

  History houses also represented an abstract idea of community that could encompass people who were unknown or absent: newcomers, strangers from another part of town, the dead. Individuals affiliated with a history house didn’t have to list their biological kin as ancestors; they could look to the skulls in the walls of the house, and count themselves part of its lineage. It was a philosophical leap for people whose idea of community may have come from knowing the faces of everyone in their nomadic tribes. History houses were like bodies that lived for generations, linking past and present city dwellers, entangling their identities with the special place that was Çatalhöyük.

  Still, it’s not likely that people in Çatalhöyük thought of themselves as Çatalites, the way a person in Brooklyn might call herself a New Yorker. Tringham believes the city functioned like a set of loosely connected villages, each with its own subculture. These enclaves may have been holdovers from what would have seemed like the distant past to Dido, when several villages merged to form the city. Before Çatalhöyük formed, Hodder said, the Konya Plain was scattered with many villages that suddenly disappeared, as if their populations had relocated to one mega-village. A person who walked across town might have passed through different neighborhood-like clusters, perhaps separated by open areas. Maybe their residents spoke different languages and ate different kinds of foods. Still, they shared a place in common, allowing someone like Dido to meet and befriend people who seemed very different from her own family.

  Obviously we can’t be certain what Dido believed and felt, but we do know that she lived in a house full of items made from such a wide variety of materials, using such disparate techniques, that they could only be the result of a diverse society with some degree of specialization. We also know that the symbolic art and designs that surrounded her every day would have reflected a belief in abstract relationships. At the same time, we have to appreciate how fundamentally bizarre city life would have been at a time when almost nobody outside Çatalhöyük was an urbanite. No doubt this gave Dido and her neighbors a vague sense of dislocation, especially because they were forming communities that had never existed before. When conflicts arose, they had few precedents to call upon in order to resolve fights or enmity between neighbors. As the city neared the end of its life, social problems spread like a stain over Çatalhöyük’s homespun community fabric. Though the city’s residents suffered through many misfortunes and survived, it turned out that the one hardship they could not endure was coping with each other.

  CHAPTER 3

  History within History

  I met Ian Hodder again in early 2018, when he’d just completed 25 years of leading excavations at Çatalhöyük. Seated behind a desk in his sunny office at Stanford, he talked about what he’d learned during that time. What stood out to him the most, other than the richness of the symbolism at every layer, is the way the site represents “history within history.” Çatalhöyük was constantly changing, and the city people founded 9,000 years ago was dramatically different from the one they abandoned a millennium later. “We now recognize a huge amount of change,” Hodder said. He continued:

  There is a moment you might call classic Çatalhöyük, circa 6500 BCE, when the whole site was densely occupied. Everywhere we dig at that level, we find dense housing. It was also a crisis point, when the aggressively egalitarian society had strains. Something dramatic has happened, and we see a lot of burning of buildings and abandonment. After that crisis, we see ritual burning regularly for 500 years.

  This “ritual burning” is not an act of violence or destruction; it’s part of the house abandonment ritual that he had shown me in the stratigraphic layers of ash from the floor of a Çatalhöyük house. When people decided to leave a home behind, they often “sealed” the foundation with a ceremonial layer of clay, and then burned the remaining household objects along with a few offerings.

  Hodder emphasized that Çatalhöyük was abandoned so slowly after the “crisis” in 6500 BCE that the shift would have been almost imperceptible during the lifetime of a single resident like Dido. People left the East Mound over centuries, and then the West. But as people abandoned the West Mound, he said, the empty land around Çatalhöyük came to life with new communities. “The Konya Plain fills with sites. It’s as if Çatalhöyük proliferates into other settlements on the plain, and the West Mound is just one. You could see it as a population explosion,” he explained. He thinks the exodus from Çatalhöyük might have represented a new kind of freedom, in which people broke away from a “closed, controlling system” on the mounds. Another possibility is that people moved in response to changing food needs. People on the Konya Plain were shifting to more intensive kinds of cereal farming and sheep herding, so perhaps they required more space around their settlements. But nobody “lost” Çatalhöyük. Even when the old city was completely empty, people still used it as a cemetery. “In a way the site was never abandoned,” Hodder said. “There are huge numbers of burials up until the Byzantine and early Islamic period [in the 11th century]. People remembered it and used it.” Newcastle University archaeologist Sophie Moore recently found evidence that cemeteries at Çatalhöyük were still being used regularly up until about 300 years ago.1

  Hodder is echoing a common belief among archaeologists today, which is that terms like “lost city” and “civilizational collapse” are the wrong ones to use in a case like this.2 Instead, it’s more accurate to say the city underwent a transition. Indeed, there never was a time when Çatalhöyük wasn’t in transition from one kind of cultural arrangement to the next. That’s the difficult part about studying cities: they are not static entities that remain the same over time before suddenly disappearing into nothingness. At any given moment, they are a composite of many social groups, who likely view city life in different ways. And those social groups also change over time, altering the physical and symbolic fabric of the city to reflect their worldviews. Until they stop wanting to live together.

  But even when that happened at Catalhöyük, nobody “lost” the city. On the Konya Plain, the city made from the bones of ancient ancestors continued to welcome the bones of new ancestors. The place remained special, long after people left it.

  By 6000 BCE, people had inhabited Çatalhöyük continuously for over a thousand years, and nobody left on a whim. With some exceptions, cities are typically abandoned the same way Hodder describes them being originally populated. Thousands of small acts empty them out, each one a hard choice. In the modern world, psychologists say that moving is one of the hardest life changes people experience, causing feelings of isolation, loss, and depression.3 Though obviously Neolithic people didn’t experience “moving” in the same way we do—carrying sofas into trucks and suffering real estate investment anxieties—the act would have exacted some of the same psychological costs. And logistically, it would have been vastly more difficult. Moving meant taking what you could carry, along with any animals you could herd. When you arrived at the new place, you’d have to build a new house and find local food and water sources. The whole process would be almost impossible to do on your own because setting up a Neolithic household was labor intensive, requiring skills that ranged from farming and cooking to textile-making and house construction.

  Imagine doing all that while also trying to assimilate into a new culture. In 2011, the US Presidential Task Force on
Immigration identified a number of hardships commonly faced by immigrants,4 ranging from the difficulty of learning new languages and cultural norms, to dealing with prejudice and lack of access to resources. We tend to forget all the ways that immigration hasn’t changed over the millennia. Many people leaving Çatalhöyük for other places would have dealt with language and cultural barriers, as well as potential problems when they bargained with new neighbors for access to farmland. And yet despite the certain difficulties they faced, they started to leave the city in greater numbers.

  The 8.2K climate event

  Hundreds of years after Dido was buried in the floor of her house, Çatalhöyük entered the final phase of its occupation. The city had stood in the same place for over a millennium, and its artificial bubble of domestication was changing from without and within. The ever-growing mound of old construction and refuse in the older parts of the city had reached new heights. Slightly before the turn of the millennium between the 6000s and 5000s BCE, people began trickling away from the East Mound, where Dido and her family had lived, and built up a smaller settlement across the river. This newer West Mound, as archaeologists call it, was a thriving community for about 300 years. As the houses on the East Mound slowly crumbled, nobody came along to claim them.

  When I asked Ruth Tringham why people defected to the West Mound and beyond, she joked that maybe it was because they were sick of hiking up such a tall mound with their water and food, so they struck out for territory that was a little flatter and more accessible. Joking aside, there is a grain of truth to the idea that something happened to make the land of the East Mound less appealing. Many researchers have noticed that the slow migration to the West Mound coincides roughly with a period of rapid climate change that starts around 6200 BCE.5 During this time, Earth was emerging from an ice age that covered Canada and the northern United States in a massive glacier called the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

  There’s evidence that rivers on the vast Konya Plain were shifting course and drying up. The weather was getting cooler, and there was at least one period of drought. Then, as temperatures warmed, the Laurentide Ice Sheet began to melt, creating two lakes of near-freezing water known as Agassiz and Ojibway. These lakes grew to cover a large area where Ontario and Quebec are today, trapped behind natural dams created by the retreating ice. But the ice wouldn’t hold for long. Eventually the Laurentide Ice Sheet collapsed, and Agassiz and Ojibway emptied rapidly, releasing catastrophic amounts of freshwater into the ocean.

  Evidence from around the world reveals that sea level rose at least 30 centimeters, and in some areas as much as four meters. More importantly, the freshwater also interfered with the ocean’s “thermohaline circulation,” a complex interaction between saltwater and freshwater that drives currents in what is sometimes called the ocean’s conveyor belt. When the thermohaline circulation is perturbed, warm water can’t traverse the globe, and most of the oceans remain chilly. This affects the weather, too. In the area around Çatalhöyük, it’s likely temperatures dropped about 4°C on average, and rainfall probably slackened as well. For people who were used to living in a warm, swampy cityscape, there would have been a noticeable shift to a cooler, more arid climate. The average global temperature didn’t rise again for almost 400 years.

  This climate shift, referred to rather blandly by climate scientists as “the 8.2k event” because it happened 8.2 thousand years ago, has been so widely documented by scientists that it serves as a model for how climate change works. In 2003, the US Department of Defense commissioned a study of the security risks posed by climate change, and researchers cited the 8.2k event as an example of how glacier melt would affect the environment and human society.6 If the rapid glacier melt we’re seeing today7 released an amount of icy freshwater into our seas equivalent to what flowed from Agassiz and Ojibway, temperatures in Asia, North America, and northern Europe would drop by over 5°F. Meanwhile, temperatures would increase by 4°F in areas throughout Australia, South America, and southern Africa. Droughts would follow, wreaking havoc on agriculture in Europe and North America, while winter storms and winds would intensify, especially in the Pacific. Famine, wildfires, and floods would come next.

  These conditions would be devastating in the modern world, but there isn’t strong agreement among archaeologists about whether the chilly, dry weather was enough to drive people away from their beloved hometown of Çatalhöyük. Ofer Bar-Yosef has studied the effect of climate change on ancient human migrations as far back as 50,000 years ago, and he’s one of the scientists who think the glacier collapse would have made life impossible on the East Mound. He believes that the cooler weather would have starved whole villages, driving people out of the area entirely for 200 years.8 Several villages he’s studied in the Levant were completely abandoned during the 8.2k event, only to be rebuilt after the weather warmed again. He suggests something similar might have happened at Çatalhöyük. The move away from the East Mound, Bar-Yosef argues, is evidence that people abandoned the area for centuries, and built the West Mound upon their return.

  Other scholars disagree. University of Reading archaeologist Pascal Flohr and her colleagues have tracked global responses to the 8.2k event, and they see no evidence for abandonment at Çatalhöyük during the weather changes.9 Indeed, they consider it a triumph of Neolithic resilience that people in the city managed to stay put and change the structure of their city, rather than pulling up stakes entirely. Flohr’s view is supported by a chemical analysis of meat storage pots during this period,10 which showed that people changed their diets, dining more often on goats, which were hardier than cattle. Extensive knife marks on animal bones suggest they were scraped for every last bit of meat, and analysis of molecules from the animals’ fat reveals that they ate plants touched by drought.

  City dwellers and farm animals may have been struggling, writes Flohr, but at least some seem to have stuck around through the tribulations of a changing environment. There’s evidence that people continued to live on the East Mound even as the West Mound came into fashion,11 and social changes overlapped with the 8.2k event but weren’t caused by it. Though it’s not certain how much of the city’s demise we can attribute to climate change, all sides in the debate agree that there was an obvious cultural shift at Çatalhöyük in the later part of the city’s life. Artistic expression changed, as well as architecture, food sources, and population size. People moved from one mound to the other, or left the region altogether. They traveled a lot more between cities and villages. Slowly, a divide opened between haves and have-nots. It’s possible that this may have been what finally set people on the road away from their city.

  The hierarchy problem

  One of the most peculiar features of Çatalhöyük’s city grid is how similar the houses are. Strolling through any modern city, we expect to see houses of every shape and size, as well as apartment buildings that are warrens of tiny studios, soaring penthouses, or basement rooms whose dirty windows poke out just above the sidewalk. There are also glossy corporate towers, massive churches, imposing government buildings, and thousands of shops in every configuration. Today’s cities are places where we can see social and economic inequality built into the landscape. But at Çatalhöyük, for hundreds of years, everybody lived in houses of roughly the same shape and size. Like Dido, everyone had a main room with a hearth and bed platforms, flanked by smaller rooms used mostly for storing food. Some history houses were more elaborately decorated than others, with impressive stacks of plastered bulls’ heads, multiple skulls in the floor, and evocative paintings on the walls depicting hunts and celebrations. But even these fancier places were no bigger than their neighbors. More importantly, there were no buildings that did not function as dwellings. It appears that there were no purpose-built temples, nor markets. Every room, no matter how elaborate, was fitted with a hearth and a bed platform.

  As Hodder puts it, there’s a rigid equality to the urban design in the city. He called it “aggressively egalitarian,” and
suggested there may have been a taboo against keeping too much private property. There were no kings or big bosses. People in Çatalhöyük may have turned to a group of wise elders for guidance, or appointed local leaders, but those leaders did not make an ostentatious show of their authority. This is one of the many reasons why archaeologists say Çatalhöyük resembles a mega-village rather than a city. Like a village, it is a collection of houses that are roughly equal in size, with no obvious center of power. Maybe, as Tringham suggested, it looked like that because it was simply several villages planted next to each other.

  That changed around 6000 BCE. Houses built during the West Mound’s peak occupation were much bigger than Dido’s in the East. Single-room hearth dwellings gave way to two-story houses with many large rooms and walled courtyards. People lived in lower-density communities but built much larger areas for food storage. We no longer find evidence of people burying their dead in the floor, and there are no bones or bull skulls plastered into the walls. Pottery becomes more elaborate and highly decorated, as if people liked the idea of putting out fancy dishes for company. At the same time, we see more household items that come from distant areas. Either they’re made with materials that come from far away, or they’re made by people in other settlements.

  It would appear that the people of the West Mound were still house-proud, but their art and symbolism was no longer connected to the structure of their homes. Instead, it was liberated from the walls and could be traded back and forth the way skulls once were. People had just as much stuff, but it wasn’t all locally produced.