Material Geographies of House Societies: Reconsidering Neolithic Çatalhöyük, Turkey

Abstract

This paper explores how people within Neolithic villages were connected to co-resident multi-family households, and considers the potential material footprint of multi-family households within Neolithic villages. Drawing upon data from Çatalhöyük, I suggest that Neolithic communities were organized around multiple competing and cooperating Houses, similar to House Societies, where house members resided in clusters of abutting buildings, all largely the same size and with similar internal organization. These space were deeply connected to telling the generative narratives of the House as a historical and genealogical social unit, including the lives and actions of the ancestors, and in some cases embedding them physically within the fabric of the building. Çatalhöyük multi-family House members decorated some important rooms with display elaboration that focused on the past, the future and the family, while the dead from the households, who in many ways were still alive and part of the ancestral House, lived beneath the floor. This study underlines that researchers need to consider social scales beyond the single-family household and consider how the multi-family House existed as an organizational foundation within Neolithic villages.