Çatalhöyük

Catalhoyuk is the single most important case of an archaeological interpretation escaping its evidence and acquiring a life of its own.

James Mellaart excavated the mound between 1961 and 1965 and read the site through a supreme Mother Goddess presiding over a peaceful matriarchal society. He identified rooms as shrines, read the female figurines as cult images, and interpreted the bull horns and the vulture paintings within that frame. It was a vivid picture, published in an accessible form, and it travelled: into popular prehistory, into second-wave feminist writing about pre-patriarchal religion, and into modern Goddess spirituality, where Catalhoyuk still functions as a founding reference. Coach parties come to the site on that basis.

The evidence has not supported it. Ian Hodder directed a long, deliberately multi-disciplinary project from 1993 to 2018, and it found no dominant female deity and no matriarchy. Of more than two and a half thousand clay figurines recovered, the large majority represent animals, not women; the female figurines are a minority, are found in middens and other refuse contexts as often as anywhere special, and several are best read as depicting older women of some standing rather than a goddess. Nakamura and Meskell's analysis of the corpus made the depositional point plainly. Nor could Mellaart's shrines be sustained as a category: the buildings he separated out are houses, more elaborately decorated than their neighbours but domestic in plan, storage and burial.

Mellaart's own standing then collapsed. After his death in 2012 his son and the researcher Eberhard Zangger examined the papers in his flat and reported prototypes and drafts indicating that he had forged documents, inscriptions and murals over many years, which also bears on the long-disputed Dorak affair, in which Mellaart claimed to have drawn a treasure that was never seen again. The distinction that matters for this site is precise: the architecture and burials he excavated are real and have been confirmed by later work; his reconstruction drawings and his transcriptions cannot be relied on as independent evidence.

Recent work has unsettled a further assumption. Analysis of 131 ancient genomes published in 2025 found that people buried beneath the floor of a single house in the earlier phases were often close biological relatives, while in later phases they often were not, and that where relatedness existed, the connections within a building ran mainly through women. The household was not a fixed biological unit across the town's life, and the basis on which people were buried together changed over time. That is a more interesting finding than a goddess, and considerably harder to put on a poster.

Catalhoyuk's houses had no front doors and no streets between them, because residents walked across the rooftops and climbed down ladders to get home.

A town with no streets

The settlement's mudbrick houses were built wall to wall with no gaps for streets, and entry was through openings in the roof reached by ladder, meaning movement across the town happened largely over the rooftops rather than at ground level, an urban arrangement without a close parallel at most other early Neolithic sites of comparable scale.

Living with the dead underfoot

Bodies were commonly buried beneath the floors of the houses residents continued to live in, and in a number of cases skulls were later removed, plastered to recreate facial features, and painted before being reburied or curated elsewhere, a practice suggesting an ongoing relationship between the living and specific deceased individuals rather than a single, final act of burial.

Bull horns built into the walls

Many houses incorporated bucrania, plastered bull skulls or horn cores set into walls and platforms, alongside painted murals of hunting scenes and geometric patterns, imagery that earlier interpretation read as straightforwardly religious. As this entry's companion article notes, one influential reading of these motifs, as evidence of a matriarchal Mother Goddess cult, has since been substantially revised by later archaeological scholarship, even as the bull imagery itself remains an undisputed and striking feature of the site.