How Many People Lived in Early Villages? Reconsidering Neolithic Demography at Çatalhöyük

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists have divergent options as to how many people lived at different Neolithic villages. Near Eastern Neolithic settlements have been historically interpreted as being occupied by thousands of people. This interpretation is founded on several observations: that excavations at settlements often reveal the remains of the densely packed mud-brick buildings, at times with buildings being reconstructed multiple times, and that settlements are defined by deep stratigraphic deposits with some degree of continued use. The frequency and tight packing of buildings is of course familiar to archaeologists living today, for both visually and spatially this pattern echo’s our personal experiences within urban contexts of confined space, restricted access, and bounded social worlds. The most contested issue at Neolithic villages, however, is how to best estimate population levels, and how long people lived in individual buildings. Revisiting the hitherto dominant picture of the mound occupation and employing the Bayesian modeled estimates of the length of individual house use, we argue that at any one time between 1,200 and 1,800 people were living on the mound of Çatalhöyük rather than 3,500 to 8,000 people, as proposed by Cessford (2001). The evolutionary development of Neolithic villages is reconsidered vis-à-vis these revised estimates.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• SAA 2021: General Sessions

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33370