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.

Socio-Material Archaeological Networks at Çatalhöyük a Community Detection Approach

“…Furthermore, it aims to highlight social units larger than the single house (e.g., neighborhoods, corporate groups or sodalities) and to inspect the way they were embedded within the wider site. This study contributes to the debate regarding the way megasites were internally organized and their forms of social integration furthermore, it contributes to the discussion regarding forms of Neolithic corporate identities (see Hodder and Pels, 2010;Hodder, 2014b;Bogaard, 2015;Benz et al, 2017;Kuijt, 2018). Socio-material network methods are used as the methodological tool for investigating these issues because they provide the opportunity to consider connectivity and dependencies between units of analysis in a synthetic way that incorporates different material classes.…”

“…In a similar vein, Bogaard and co-workers refer to forms of cooperative farming at Çatalhöyük and at other PPN-PN sites (Bogaard, 2015(Bogaard, , 2017Bogaard et al, 2017). Kuijt (2018) has recently suggested that the social geography of Çatalhöyük can best be characterized as an expression of households as multi-family houses. Applying Lévi-Strauss' concept of house society, Kuijt attributes specific function to particular houses (e.g., places for burying the dead or places for symbolic elaboration) used by an extended/multifamily household made up of different families/components kept together by affiliation/membership spatially spread in clusters of structures.…”

Dynamic Houses and Communities at Çatalhöyük: A Building Biography Approach to Prehistoric Social Structure

“…Buildings were elaborated with sculptural elements affixed to walls or set upon clay or wooden pillars, and these often incorporate large faunal remains such as horns and mandibles. Well-preserved sculptural installations are concentrated in a few houses (Kuijt 2018; Twiss 2012). However, excavators often uncover truncation cuts along walls or platform edges where such features may have stood, and if these are included in the data (as they are in this paper), they appear more common, albeit with some houses more sculpturally elaborate than others.…”

“…Others posit formal corporate institutions grouping houses together, bounded by polygons on the settlement plan (e.g. Düring 2006; Kuijt 2018), or suggest more loose affiliations among neighbouring or far-flung households (Wright 2014). Twiss (2012, 67) notes that, although researchers have adopted nuanced social perspectives on households and larger groups, in much of the data there is ‘surprisingly little evidence for socioeconomic interaction between … modes of consumption’.…”

“…The reconstruction of past societies’ institutional structure remains one of the predominant uses of prehistoric houses in archaeology, especially in the Near East. The kinds of institutional arrangements considered have grown significantly in variety and sophistication: in addition to nuclear families, lineages, forager bands and nascent chiefdoms, possibilities such as secret societies (Hayden 2018), religious sodalities (Hodder 2018; Mills 2014), moieties (Pilloud 2009) and Lévi-Straussian ‘Houses’ (Beck 2007; Joyce & Gillespie 2000; Kuijt 2018) are now regularly suggested. Nevertheless, this broader palette of social models does not in itself address the deeper epistemic critique that Tringham raised in the 1990s.…”