An interesting dental analysis has recently discovered that the people living in the 'houses' at Çatalhöyük in Turkey were not closley related - whatever the buildings there represent, they do not seem to comprise a settlement as we would (normally) understand it. We would have expected to find people living together in extended kinship groups, but it seems Çatalhöyük was a little different.
Marin Pilloud of the Central Identification Laboratory in Hickam, Hawaii and Clark Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus did a detailed analysis of the teeth from the skeletons at Çatalhöyük and made the remarkable discovery. Follow the story here.
How can we explain this? Well, people were grinding grains, making bread and cooking on hearths in these structures, but the news that they were not living in family groups might suggest the site represents a religious site rather than a conventional settlement. If the site represents a religious complex we might anticipate the people there were responsible for organising the activities associated with the religion/cult, and they would need a support network to maintain them as they presided over their religious duties.
We see this kind of nucleated religious site almost everywhere - consider the Maltese Temple complexes, or the later Egyptian or Greek equivalents such as those at Luxor and Delphi. These places became the focus of pilgrimage for ordinary people. Perhaps this is what we are seeing at Çatalhöyük in Turkey?
