Settled more than 9,000 years ago in Turkey, C'atalhoyuk focused on farming with the seeds of urban living planted at its heart. Beginning in the 1960s, work at C'atalhoyuk (in central Turkey) has unearthed numerous levels of close-knit households where a large community of people lived during the Stone Age as humanity began to reject nomadic life.
The Konya Plain stretches for hundreds of miles across central Turkey. Almost 60 years ago, in a remote spot some 30 miles from the regional capital of Konya, a team of archaeologists began exploring two small hills. A fork in a local footpath and the two mounds themselves gave the site its modern name. Fork (c'atal in Turkish) and mound (hoyuk) combine to form C'atalhoyuk. Today the site is regarded by UNESCO as the most significant human settlement documenting early settled agricultural life. (See also: Face of a 9,500-year-old man revealed for the first time.)
Founded over 9,000 years ago on the bank of a river that has since dried up, C'atalhoyuk is believed to have been home to an egalitarian Stone Age society who built distinctive homes, arranged back-to-back without doors or windows. They went in and out through openings in the roof. On the inside, they left wall paintings and enigmatic figurines. Picture of the Konya Plain in Turkey In Plain Sight C'atalhoyuk sits on the Konya Plain in Turkey. Its eastern mound (right) was settled about 1,500 years before the western one (left). Much of the site has yet to be excavated. Photograph by IMAGES & STORIES/ALAMY/ACI
These dwellings also played an important role in their funerary practices: Residents buried the dead under their homes. At its peak, the town housed as many as 8,000 people, who supported themselves through agriculture and raising livestock. Get more of the inspiring photos and stories we're known for, plus special offers.
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Aside from revealing fascinating details as to what life in a Stone Age town was like, the site chronicles a critical moment in human history: when people were starting to abandon nomadic ways. Prior to the settlement at C'atalhoyuk, humanity had been wanderers for hundreds of thousands of years. C'atalhoyuk marks a time when people embarked on one of the earliest experiments in “urban” living. Going with the grain Map by NG MAPS
C'atalhoyuk lies at the western end of the Fertile Crescent, the area in which farming settlements first appeared at the dawn of the Neolithic period. From 13,000 B.C., the Natufian people had gathered grain and founded early villages, including a site near modern-day Jericho. Even so, historians consider that the general trend to settled farming began around 10,00
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