Last week I managed to take a few days to travel from Jordan to Turkey to visit two important Neolithic sites, Çatalhöyük and Boncuklu, located on the Konya Plain.
Çatalhöyük (http://www.catalhoyuk.com/) is probably the best known Neolithic site in the world. Çatalhöyük dates back 9000 years, and excavations here have been conducted since the 1960’s. The site which has been assigned UNESCO world heritage status, consists of two large mounds, or tells, which are covered with shelters to protect the fragile archaeology which is exposed and available to visitors all year round. Visiting Çatalhöyük had always been on the top of my list of Neolithic sites to visit and after a short plane ride from Amman to Antalya and then a five hour drive to the site via the city of Konya, I finally made it. The site itself was available to visit from the viewing platforms. There is also a small visitor centre/ museum and multiple reconstructions of the houses. You can enter and walk around these reconstructions. The reconstructions really help visitors to understand the architecture and village layout because the inhabitants entered their buildings form the roofs, and there were no streets in between the dwellings. The buildings at Çatalhöyük are made from mud. Mud plasters, mud roofs, mud storage features. You can clearly see the mud bricks in the wall construction. The site is extremely complex with multiple phases of re-building. Many of the houses revealed the dead buried beneath the floors. Some of the houses had painted decorations on the walls and installations with bull heads. The depth of the archaeology is amazing. Although I have seen many pictures of Çatalhöyük, and used it as a case study in teaching, it really needs to be seen to appreciate just how big, and how deep the site is!
After visiting Çatalhöyük, we drove the 10km to the nearby site of Boncuklu (http://boncuklu.org/). I have previously worked on the microscopic plant remains, the silica phytoliths, from Boncuklu with Dr Emma Jenkins and Dr Ambroise Baker. Our work recently contributed to a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) which examines our understanding of plant cultivation and agricultural spread out of the Levant (Baird et al 2018). This site is currently being excavated by Prof Douglas Baird, from University of Liverpool and Dr Andrew Fairbairn from the University of Queensland. The team are returning this summer to continue excavations. This site remains back-filled (covered up) when excavations are not taking place. So there was nothing to see at the site itself, but they have a small visitor centre with informative posters about the site and also some reconstructions of the houses which you can also enter. The site of Bonculklu dates back further than Çatalhöyük to 10,500 years ago. The buildings at Boncuklu are circular in comparison to the rectilinear buildings seen at nearby Çatalhöyük.
Baird, D., Fairbairn, A., Jenkins, E., Martin, L., Middleton, C., Pearson, J., Asouti, E., Edwards, Y., Kabukcu, C., MustafaoÄŸlu, G., Russell, N., Bar-Yosef, O., Jacobsen, G., Wu, X., Baker, A. and Elliott, S., 2018. Agricultural origins on the Anatolian plateau. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115 (14), E3077-E3086.