Çatalhöyük

Çatalhöyük was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2012 as a Neolithic settlement, out on the Konya plain about 40 km southeast of the city. It was identified by James Mellaart in 1958 and first excavated in the 1960s.

People lived here for well over a thousand years in mud-brick houses packed wall to wall, with no streets between them. You entered through a hole in the roof and walked across the rooftops of your neighbours to get home. Under the floors of those houses, the dead were buried.

What stands is low mud-brick wall under two large shelters. There are no columns, no theatre, no facade. A group arriving from Ephesus or Pergamon will register this as a step down unless you have prepared them.

That makes Çatalhöyük the site where narration carries the entire load. Everywhere else the stones do part of the work; here they do almost none. If the back half of your group cannot follow what you are saying under the shelter, they have not had a visit -- they have looked at a pit.

The visitor centre and the reconstructed house sit at the north end. From there it is about 160 m to the north shelter and a further 240 m to the south shelter, which holds the main excavation section.

Start at the reconstructed house. It is the only place on site where a Neolithic interior is legible as a room -- painted walls, a platform, the roof entrance -- and once the group has stood inside one, the wall stubs under the shelters stop being rubble and become floor plans. Doing it the other way round wastes the excavation.