Infants and neonates were buried near hearths older men and women were buried under platforms away from the stove.īut there’s a lot more we don’t know, and Hodder uses his book to outline what the inhabitants’ beliefs might have been. They buried (or possibly re-buried) their dead underneath the floors.

(Hodder is careful not to use value-laden words such as ‘strange.’) They incorporated animal skulls, particularly horned ones, into the walls of their buildings. The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük also did some things that we might consider taboo today. Sometimes the inhabitants plastered over the paintings – replastering was done regularly, sometimes almost monthly. Floors and walls were plastered and sometimes had painted decorations. They entered their houses from the roof the stairs or ladders were generally placed over the stove. The occupants buried caches of obsidian and later retrieved them. In the early, lower levels of the site, cooking was done by placing heated clay balls into the food by the later period of the occupation, cooking was done in vessels that could be placed in or over stoves to be heated.

There’s a lot the archeologists can tell from the site at Çatalhöyük. “The Leopard’s Tale,” is Hodder’s effort to piece together the daily lives of the Neolithic people of Çatalhöyük based on the interesting but perhaps somewhat sparse artifacts that have survived. Ian Hodder is a Stanford anthropologist who is leading the excavations underway now. The site was first found and excavated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There are 18 levels of occupation – people filled in old houses and then built on top of them. It was occupied from between 7400 BC and 6000 BC, almost too early to call it a town. The archeological site Çatalhöyük, in central Turkey, was the site of a large (33.5 acres) and populous (3000 – 8000 people) town.

The Leopard's Tale by Ian Hodder