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[1]HOME 11/10/2003

Pre-Historic Çatal Höyük in [2]Anatolia

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was first discovered in the late
1950s and excavated by James Mellaart between 1961 and 1965. The site
rapidly became famous internationally due to the large size and dense
occupation of the settlement as well as the spectacular wall paintings
and other art that was uncovered inside the houses .....

Nine thousand years ago visitors approaching Çatalhöyük from across a
vast marshy plain would have seen hundreds of mud-brick dwellings on
the slopes of an enormous settlement mound. The site's several
thousand inhabitants would have been herding sheep or goats; hunting
wild cattle (aurochs), horse, and deer; tending crops of peas,
lentils, and cereals; or collecting wild plant foods such as tubers
from the marshes. Some would have been bringing valuable raw materials
to the site such as obsidian from volcanic peaks to the northeast. In
size and complexity Çatalhöyük was unlike any other site in the world.
The American archaeologist Walter Fairservis Junior writing in 1975
described it as a community at the threshold of civilization ......

[3]Micromorphologist removes a sample from a wall in the old
excavation area 

[4]THE WORLD'S FIRST CITY (Archaeology Magazine)

Ancient cities as we find them today are not impressive sights. All
that remains of Catal Huyuk, the first city, is a gullied pitted mound
floating in a rolling plain of wheatfields. Little is left to show
that this place was a primary source of Western civilization, a nexus
of trade and ideas for two thousand years, the first organized
cosmopolitan city-state and arguably the source of the Great Mother
Goddess religion -- the universal faith of Europe, the [5]Near East
and the Far East before the great empires of the Fertile Crescent
arose. Sadly most of the research on this unique neolithic site has
been abandoned and thousands of pages of analysis remain unpublished.
Only one acre of the thirty-two acre mound has been systematically
excavated, recorded, and reported. This was Catal Huyuk, the
ancestress of all other cities, a unique Temple City that was the
religious center of the first great prehistoric civilization .....

1. http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/index.html
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