Catalhoyuk
A town of several thousand with no streets — people walked over the roofs and entered through them.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.8 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Catalhoyuk in central Anatolia, occupied from about 7500 to 5700 BCE, is one of the largest and best-preserved Neolithic settlements known: mudbrick houses packed wall to wall with no doors at ground level, entered by ladder through the roof, the rooftops serving as the streets. Interiors carry wall paintings, bull skulls set into benches and burials beneath the floors. Strikingly, the houses are almost uniform in size — there is little sign of an elite, and no evidence of public buildings at all.