Çatalhöyük is an icon of Neolithic architecture. The settlement in central Türkiye has long been studied to help us understand the transition humans made from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one that was dependent on raising crops and the domestication of animals.

Çatalhöyük is significant, as “[s]ome scholars consider [it] to be the world’s first city, and its murals are recognized by art historians as unique in world history,” write archaeologists Orrin C. Shane, III and Mine Küçük. Its uniqueness also comes from its urban layout. Housing up to possibly 8,000 people at its peak, the settlement was divided into family dwellings that shared walls with the neighboring residence. The main construction material was mudbrick painted with plaster. The homes were clustered together, with no streets separating them. To move from space to space, residents walked on the roof tops—which is also where the entrances to their homes were. They used ladders to enter and exit homes. Descending into the home, visitors would see modest but immaculate living quarters that were decorated with painting and sculpture.

The architecture and objects found at Çatalhöyük give us insight into the lives of the Neolithic peoples who built and lived in the city. Over the decades of studying the site, our understanding of its residents has evolved with the accumulation of new findings uncovered by archaeologists. Excavation on the site began in the late 1950s under the guidance of the British Dutch archaeologist James Mellaart. However, Mellaart’s interpretations of archaeological evidence have since been challenged, as his study of Çatalhöyük was shaped by his traditional European education that included assumptions about ancient cultures that would no longer be made today.

One of these assumptions, made by Mellaart after the discovery of sculpture and paintings that depicted voluptuous, nude women, was his hypothesis that Çatalhöyük was home to a matriarchal society that worshipped a “mother goddess.” This theory gained steam in the 1970s, at the height of the Feminist movement. Archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas included the theory in her 1974 Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe. In a 1978 article for Feminist Studies, historian Anne Barstow explains that Mellart argued that the city’s religion originated in the women. As he claimed,

by performing or controlling many of the economic tasks, women gained authority in the community and became predominant in the priestly class. From this base they created the community’s religion, a religion devoted to the conservation of life in all forms, devoted to the mysteries of birth and nourishment and life after death.

Archaeologist Ian Hodder has thoughtfully pushed back on the “mother goddess” theory. Hodder, who is now the Dunlevie Family Professor, Emeritus at Stanford University, led a twenty-five-year research project at Çatalhöyük that began in 1993. In his article “Women and Men at Çatalhöyük,” Hodder points to extensive research that shows very limited provable differences between the lives of women and men at the Neolithic settlement. This counters the hypothesis that Çatalhöyük was a matriarchal society with a priestess class, as that should result in material evidence of quality-of-life differences. Based on more recent research, he proposes that

[w]e are not witnessing a patriarchy or a matriarchy. What we are seeing is perhaps more interesting—a society in which, in many areas, the question of whether you were a man or a woman did not determine the life you could lead.

Shane and Küçük also push back against Mellaart’s theory, explaining that the rooms he “called shrines—buildings with murals, plaster reliefs, and sculpture—are numerous and occur throughout the mound, demonstrating that there is no evidence of a ritual elite concentrated in a ‘priestly quarter,’ as he suggested.”

While Mellaart’s legacy at Çatalhöyük lives on in research discussions, his own impact on the site was more controversial. After publishing drawings of antiquities of the Yortan culture that had never been registered with the Turkish government, he was accused of smuggling in the early 1960s in an incident that became known as “the Dorak affair.” He proclaimed his innocence for the rest of his life, but the Turkish government first banned him from working at Çatalhöyük and later banned him from the country.

Thankfully, despite some rough moments in early explorations of the site, continued research at Çatalhöyük is helping to further our understanding of peoples who lived millennia ago.

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