All there is at Çatalhöyük are houses and middens and [animal] pens. …no plazas or courtyards, alleyways or streets, have been found…. People entered their homes via doors on their roofs, and neighbors clambered over each other's roofs to their own homes.
Given the densely packed dwellings, the community … must have experienced a variety of social frictions. A slumping wall in one house would damage a neighbor's dwelling. People and animals stomped over neighboring roofs. House mice skittered into food bins and under the reed-covered floors. Household garbage and human feces were swept into small open areas between houses; sometimes an abandoned house was used as a dump. Filled with rotting organic material, the dumps must have attracted swarms of flies….
And yet, people continued to live at Çatalhöyük, rebuilding homes, replastering the floors and walls dozens of times … burying their loved ones in the house floors, covering the graves, and continuing to occupy the spaces.
From: The Prehistory of Home by Jerry D. Moore. Berkely : University of California Press, c2012. p. 94-95 (chapter on Apartment living).
Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, was inhabited from 7400 to 6200 BC.
This is why I like my job: I get to read things like this. Of course, I'm not supposed to read them--just catalog them.
Given the densely packed dwellings, the community … must have experienced a variety of social frictions. A slumping wall in one house would damage a neighbor's dwelling. People and animals stomped over neighboring roofs. House mice skittered into food bins and under the reed-covered floors. Household garbage and human feces were swept into small open areas between houses; sometimes an abandoned house was used as a dump. Filled with rotting organic material, the dumps must have attracted swarms of flies….
And yet, people continued to live at Çatalhöyük, rebuilding homes, replastering the floors and walls dozens of times … burying their loved ones in the house floors, covering the graves, and continuing to occupy the spaces.
From: The Prehistory of Home by Jerry D. Moore. Berkely : University of California Press, c2012. p. 94-95 (chapter on Apartment living).
Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, was inhabited from 7400 to 6200 BC.
This is why I like my job: I get to read things like this. Of course, I'm not supposed to read them--just catalog them.