For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about exploring the intersection of consciousness and creativity among Neolithic settlers at Çatalhöyük.
Around nine thousand years ago, a group of people founded a settlement in a low wetland area in what is now central Turkey. They built a cluster of rectangular clay brick homes with adjoining walls and entries through their roofs. Their homes had built-in ovens and white plastered interior walls decorated with red geometric murals and with the mounted horns of bulls. As in many ancient settlements, residents over the generations built new homes directly on the remains of older ones, increasing the size of the mound. After several centuries, the center of settlement shifted to another nearby site, and by around 5700 B.C., the settlement had largely dispersed. The area’s climate grew drier, preserving the compacted remains of the proto-city from erosion.
Today the remains of the settlement, now called Çatalhöyük, are considered one of the most detailed and important records left by humans in the Neolithic era — roughly 9000-5000 B.C. (after the development of agriculture but before metallurgy). Çatalhöyük was first excavated by British archaeologists beginning in the 1960s before being temporarily abandoned. New excavations began in the early 1990s, led by Stanford University’s Ian Hodder with a team of dozens of U.S., Turkish, and international researchers painstakingly examining the site to understand more about the lives of the people who built it.