Four Lost Cities

by Annalee Newitz

  This shift toward larger houses and trade on the West Mound may have been a sign that social hierarchy was emerging. There were people who had two-story houses and a lot of storage, while others still had only the single-room dwellings that were once the norm on the East Mound. Notre Dame archaeologist Ian Kuijt believes that this architectural shift reveals a conflict that had long been brewing in the city.12 People in places like Çatalhöyük, he explains, had inherited their ideas about community and spirituality partly from their nomadic forebears. Because nomadic life requires everyone in the group to share resources to survive, these groups developed customs and rituals that reinforced a very flat social structure. If anyone started hoarding resources too much, that would be bad for the entire group, so people would strongly discourage each other from ostentatious displays of social differences. This might be one reason why houses at Çatalhöyük were so outwardly similar, even though people clearly had very different amounts of food and symbolic objects in the private realm behind closed doors.

  Social pressure to be egalitarian can work well in a small community where the lives of your neighbors are bound to yours. But once you have thousands of people living together, equality is harder to maintain. City dwellers might want representatives or proto-politicians to speak up for their interests, or a trade guild leader who can understand the special needs of, say, obsidian toolmakers. It’s hard to make personal connections with everyone in a city full of strangers. People living in Çatalhöyük were torn between two sets of customs: the older communitarian one, in which difference and hierarchy are discouraged, and the newer, urban one, in which both are unavoidable.

  Kuijt believes major conflicts would have emerged when traditional egalitarianism started to feel like rigid conformity. When tensions ran too high, people might have started to walk away from the East Mound, whose urban plan was purpose-built to promote the idea that nobody should be significantly different from her neighbors. West Mounders built homes spaced farther apart, with a wide range of floor plans, suggesting a society where people were publicly proclaiming their individuality.

  Still, architectural reform wasn’t enough to keep people there. Roughly three centuries after the first signs of habitation on the West Mound, almost nobody was living there or on the East Mound anymore. And by 5500 BCE, Çatalhöyük was entirely empty. Kuijt ascribes the city’s demise to a broader “failure of the Neolithic experiment,” and argues that it was part of a more widespread abandonment of Neolithic mega-villages throughout the Levant during the 5000s BCE. It may have been, as Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel put it, “a failure of the public sphere.” People couldn’t agree on new ways of organizing their society, and this eroded their attachment to a place that increasingly represented a dying tradition. And yet, the city did last for over 1,000 years. It may ultimately have been what Kuijt dubs “the Neolithic dead end,” but the story is more complicated than that.

  While Hodder and Kuijt argue that the city’s early layout suggested egalitarianism, Rosemary Joyce disagrees. She’s not convinced that the city’s populace had ever enjoyed a “flat” social structure. I visited Joyce in her office at UC Berkeley to find out more.

  Clearing a pile of books away from a chair to make room for me, Joyce wasted no time in getting to the point of questioning everything I had learned. She’s profoundly skeptical about the idea that houses at Çatalhöyük all looked basically the same. She thinks that Tringham’s excavations of Dido’s house make it obvious that there was never one kind of “ideal” Çatalhöyük house. I recalled my conversation with Tringham when we first met, and how she traced the outline of the rooms in Dido’s house on an excavation drawing. Though Dido lived during the height of what Hodder would call the city’s flat social structure phase, there was strong evidence that her family had built additional rooms for more than storage. There were two small rooms off the hearth area that may have been bedrooms or workrooms. Tringham described how the doorway between Dido’s main hearth room and those side rooms was walled off at some point late in the house’s life, as if their inhabitants had moved on or died.

  At the time, I had focused on all the ways Dido’s house resembled other ones in the city. But Joyce highlighted its ever-changing number of rooms. Perhaps, said Joyce, this kind of variability was the norm at Çatalhöyük, and we’ve been so enamored of the “egalitarianism” hypothesis that we missed evidence of variability right in front of our noses. I had to admit she might be right. I thought about how journalists 50 years ago had gotten so excited about Mellaart’s idea of a goddess-worshipping matriarchy. Maybe my fascination with an egalitarian society was blinding me to evidence of social classes. Plus, Joyce continued, house size isn’t the only way to measure hierarchy. Çatalhöyük’s elaborately decorated history houses could also be a sign that there was inequality between households. “Inequality emerges from differences, even modest ones. Some houses are full of symbolic media and others aren’t. To say this isn’t inequality is strange.” She paused and shrugged. “I’m sorry, but these houses are not the houses of equal people.”

  Joyce pointed out that we fundamentally don’t know how people at Çatalhöyük would have understood social hierarchy. Maybe it didn’t have much to do with how many bins of grain a person had, or how many plastered bulls’ heads. Maybe there were shamans who wore special body paint or perishable clothing that didn’t survive the millennia. Though everyone in the city might have recognized one particular shaman as a leader, we wouldn’t necessarily see evidence for his status in the archaeological record. Social status doesn’t always translate into material wealth, Joyce said. It can also mean access to secrets, or special places, or exclusive gatherings. And that’s something we wouldn’t see in the remains of a house or skeleton. “Hierarchy and access can be measured in things that don’t show up in people’s bodies,” she mused. “Sometimes you get a hierarchical ruler without architectural signs.” Joyce’s perspective adds nuance to Çatalhöyük’s unresolvable conflicts. One battle was brewing between traditionalists who wanted a flat social structure and those who didn’t; another simmered between the emerging elites and lower classes.

  Late in the city’s life, Hodder said, these tensions were exacerbated by another social shift: the city’s residents were becoming more mobile, traveling great distances to other cities or to quarries where they gathered raw materials. They were starting to realize that other options existed beyond the city’s walls. The decorated clay stamps that people in the Neolithic commonly carried—probably as a way to display personal identity—weren’t their only form of portable crafts. People at Çatalhöyük traded with neighboring communities, some over 100 kilometers away, swapping jewelry, baskets, pottery, shells, and raw materials like obsidian and chert to make blade tools. These trade networks suggest that domestication always involved social connections with remote communities, but movement between these communities became more common as the city neared its end. People’s identities were less entangled with a specific built environment, and more entangled with their trade goods. As they wandered between settlements and saw a plethora of objects from far away, Çatalhöyük might have seemed less special. The place was losing its allure.

  The Death Pit

  V. Gordon Childe, the anthropologist who invented the term Neolithic Revolution, also created a definition of cities in 1950 that continues to influence archaeology today. To be a city, he argued, a settlement must have a population living at high density, monumental architecture, symbolic art, specialization, money and taxation, writing, long-distance trade, surplus goods, and complex social hierarchy. By this definition, Çatalhöyük is a proto-city at best. It had no money, writing, nor monuments—and probably only a simple hierarchy. Hodder says he’s comfortable calling it a town, but not a city. “Çatal doesn’t fit the classic city definition, if by that you mean specialization of production,” he told me. “There are no zones for special activities. You don’t have different parts of the city doing diffe
rent things. Everything happened inside the house, from rituals to economic production.”

  Still, there are good reasons to think of Çatalhöyük as a city. As UCLA anthropologist Monica Smith writes, Childe’s framework is intended to define “the most complex form of aggregated populations”13 in a relative way. We might say that Çatalhöyük was the city of its time, more complex than any of the surrounding settlements. Smith adds that archaeologists today also believe that it’s possible to have a city without a rigid hierarchical structure—instead, all that’s required is “highly visible labor investment, and a sustainable social network afterward.”

  Smith’s point here might also help us unravel the mystery of why people left Çatalhöyük before it became a city more like Uruk, which rose in the Levant thousands of years later, complete with writing, taxation, money, and giant ziggurats. Essentially, the labor investment required to maintain the city and its social network was no longer worth it. This forms the essence of historian Joseph A. Tainter’s grand theory in his influential book The Collapse of Complex Societies.14 He argues that most societies lose their cohesion when people get “declining marginal returns” on their investment in a city’s physical and social infrastructure. Rosemary Joyce put it another way: “When you live in a city, the walls of other people’s houses will fall on you. Stuff accumulates in the street that will affect you. You take on a lot of extra work. Çatalhöyük was an attractive investment for many generations, and then it stopped being enough of an attraction to make up for it going downhill.” The people who lived at Çatalhöyük toward the end would definitely have dealt with a lot of collapsing structures, with fewer helping hands to clean things up. Walking away was hard, but it was easier than resolving the problems that were ripping Çatalhöyük apart.

  One of the most influential post-Childe definitions of the city comes from historian William Cronon, who argued in Nature’s Metropolis15 that a city is defined partly by the rural and agricultural regions that support it. Though Cronon was talking about Chicago, an industrial metropolis, his idea is crucial for understanding Çatalhöyük’s status as a city. In essence, Cronon made the case that agricultural complexity is a key part of urbanism. We know that people at Çatalhöyük grew a wide range of crops and reared animals, and processing farm products would have taken a lot of time. Troubles created by the 8.2k climate change event, followed by course shifts in local rivers, would have been major sources of strain. There’s ample evidence that the city wasn’t abandoned entirely because farms were failing, but food insecurity would have sent some families packing.

  Though Çatalhöyük occupied a gray area between city and proto-city, its abandonment fits a pattern that emerges repeatedly in urban history. Climate change made farming tougher, and the city’s festering social and cultural wounds drove neighbors away from each other. Each abandoned house created more work for the people who remained behind, trying desperately to prevent those rooftop sidewalks from collapsing under them. Over time, individual acts of abandonment added up to a mass action. But this process would take centuries. For people living through this late period in the city’s history, it might not have been obvious that the place would one day stand empty.

  Many people left Çatalhöyük to return to village life in settlements scattered across the Konya Plain, while others were drawn to cities like the one they left behind. British archaeologist Stuart Campbell tells a terrifying story about one of these places. He was excavating at a site called Domuztepe, roughly 130 kilometers east of Çatalhöyük, when he and his colleagues uncovered the remains of a ritual so grisly that they named it the “Death Pit.” Founded just as Çatalhöyük was nearing the end of its life, Domuztepe boasted thousands of residents and lasted for centuries. It was one place where mass society flourished after most of Çatalhöyük’s residents had abandoned their homes, and we can see evidence of some continuity with West Mound culture. Houses were large, often decorated with red ochre, and didn’t contain any skeletons in the floors as they had on the earlier East Mound.

  In fact, Campbell and the excavation team found almost no skeletons at all until they uncovered the Death Pit, which held the remains of about 40 people. Many of the bones came from older skeletons, likely ancestors, shattered and mixed into a thick cement-like clay that was layered on top of the remains of several whole cows and other animals from a feast. After the feast, people had molded the bone-studded clay into a hollow mound and stuffed it with more human remains, this time from the recently dead, including several skulls that appeared to have been smashed on one side. Campbell and his colleagues speculated that the skulls were crushed in this way so their brains could be scooped out directly after death.

  Domuztepe’s people dug the Death Pit next to a very special place in their city: a 75-meter-long “Red Terrace” that cut through the center of the settlement. The Red Terrace was probably over a meter high, perhaps creating an elevated walkway or ceremonial boundary, and Domuztepe’s people had built it up over hundreds of years using layers of imported red clay interleaved with white plaster. It would have stood out in the city’s landscape, a startling red-and-white wall dividing one side of town from another. To dig the Death Pit, residents at Domuztepe had to scoop out part of the Red Terrace and dig beneath it. After whatever activities led to all those dead bodies, the city’s residents lit a bonfire so enormous that it left a thick ashy layer. Campbell and his colleagues speculate that the fire would have been visible from far away. This monstrous flame, roaring over a structure made from human bodies and clay, was surely a symbol of the city’s might. Campbell described it as an example of how people entangled their identities with a location, echoing practices we see in Çatalhöyük’s houses.

  The difference is that the Death Pit was created as part of a large-scale public ritual. This isn’t a set of ancestor bones buried in the floor of a home, for the benefit of a domestic group; it’s a large collection of bodies, some freshly killed for the occasion, buried next to a wall that spans almost the whole city. We could think of Domuztepe’s urban grid as an example of late Neolithic people trying to move beyond the world of Çatalhöyük. Here, boundary walls didn’t merely carve out a private sphere. Rather, they were fetishistically molded into a central public monument, suggesting a fascination with difference and hierarchy. And the Death Pit ceremony itself must have been led by a person or group of people with enough authority that they could gather the city together for a multi-cow feast, ancestor ritual, and sacrifice. The hierarchical structures we see starting to emerge at Çatalhöyük appear to have been in full flower at Domuztepe. As Campbell told the story, I kept thinking about the people at Çatalhöyük who chafed against the city’s flat social structure. Perhaps some of them abandoned Çatalhöyük to join Domuztepe.

  In a paper about the Death Pit,16 Campbell points out that the bone-and-fire ceremony wasn’t some gory act of violence. Instead, it was a transformative ritual, joining people to the land. The Death Pit was a place where human remains were treated like clay. The bones of humans became the bones of the city. In the modern world, Campbell explains, we make a rigid distinction between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. But our categories “may not reflect past beliefs,” Campbell writes. Maybe the Death Pit was also an act of life-giving, in which human blood and bone symbolically revitalized the city.

  In the Neolithic imagination, houses and cities might be equivalent to people and societies. The city is alive. It is a tool, an ancestor, a cosmology, and a history. When we leave it behind, we leave a part of ourselves behind, too. But when we walk the streets of the next place, we find ourselves again, for better and for worse.

  PART TWO

  Pompeii

  THE STREET

  CHAPTER 4

  Riot on the Via dell’Abbondanza

  About 5,000 years after Çatalhöyük’s population trickled away from the West Mound, a city of roughly the same population was buried under six meters of broiling hot volcanic ash. Unlike
the people of Çatalhöyük, who gradually drifted away by choice, the 12,000 residents of Pompeii suffered an abrupt loss. In 79 CE they watched their city obliterated by a terrifying, violent volcanic eruption that must have haunted them for the rest of their lives. Earthquakes moved the shoreline a kilometer away from Pompeii’s city walls, and Mount Vesuvius spewed a thick layer of fiery ash that turned fertile farms into sterile wastelands. After the disaster, refugees from Pompeii fled to the nearby coastal cities of Cumae, Neapolis (Naples), and Puteoli (Pozzeoli). Only one first-person account of the catastrophe was ever recorded.

  It wasn’t until the 1700s that engineers working for Charles VII, King of Naples, began to excavate the city systematically. The place was a revelation because it had been preserved intact beneath the hardened ash. Other Roman ruins had fallen into eroded piles of marble, or were buried beneath modern cities. But at Pompeii, everything was preserved, from sumptuous temple offerings to price lists for takeout. Early explorers carefully chronicled what they found but focused most of their energies on plundering gold, jewels, and priceless mosaics. Today, however, archaeologists come to Pompeii to glimpse everyday life at the height of the Roman Empire. The city was frozen in time, or perhaps cooked, with all the quirky cultural ephemera that are usually erased in continuously occupied cities like Rome or Istanbul.

  The house was arguably the center of life at Çatalhöyük, but at Pompeii the street was where everything happened. In the shops, baths, and tabernas (pubs), people lived and worked, made plans, and met new friends. Romans invented a new kind of public life in their streets, codified by law and enforced through social norms. People of all classes and backgrounds mingled on sidewalks made from cement and compacted dirt. Old villas belonging to the ultrarich sprawled near a business association for freed slaves; well-heeled tourists from three continents rubbed shoulders with townie bartenders in the tabernas. Rich landladies glanced sidelong at sex workers calling to men from the rooms where they plied their trade. Nothing embodied everyday public life in Pompeii more than the city’s street scenes and related amusements.