Reconsidering the Çatalhöyük Community

From Households to Settlement Systems

Abstract

With an area of 13 ha and an estimated population running into the thousands, Çatalhöyük is one of the largest settlements of the Near Eastern Neolithic. On the basis of its size, the site has often been interpreted as a town or city, without due consideration whether the settlement has the characteristics associated with these concepts. Furthermore, the normative categorization of the settlement has led to a neglect of how the local community at Çatalhöyük was constituted. In this study my focus is on the ways in which the built environment at Çatalhöyük structured social interaction at various scales of social life. It is argued that the local community was constituted through a series of nested social collectivities central to the social life of people at Çatalhöyük. Finally, I consider the manner in which the Çatalhöyük community was related to other communities, on the basis of regional settlement data.