How Many People Lived in the World’s Earliest Villages? Reconsidering Community Size and Population Pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Some researchers hold that Near East Neolithic agricultural villages were composed of thousands of people and that these villages existed as an evolutionary starting point on the path to rapid population growth and urbanism. Revaluating the settlement of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, in this paper we outline how historical estimates of Neolithic population levels are disengaged from current archaeological and ethnographic data. To gain a more nuanced and robust understanding of Neolithic site demography we develop multiple population scenarios and outline how spatial packing of buildings and building use-life are critical in estimating past population levels. In contrast to historical views of Çatalhöyük being occupied by 3,500–10,000 people, we estimate between 600 and 800 people would have lived at Çatalhöyük East during an average year during the Early (7100–6700 cal BC) and Middle (6700–6500 cal BC) phases, and between 200 and 400 people would have lived at Çatalhöyük East during an average year during the Late (6500–6300 cal BC) and Final (6300–5950 cal BC) phases. Collectively there is a clear need to reconsider arguments for population pressure as a driver of the Forager-Farmer transition, the development of food production, and the emergence of social inequality in the context of early agricultural villages.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• Peopling the Past: Critically Evaluating Settlement and Regional Population Estimates with New Methods and Demographic Modeling

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37118.0