The First Religions

Archaeologists excavating at Çatalhöyük, with embedded bull horns at lower left.
"Imagine a great mound 70 feet high and about 750 feet wide, made up of mud-brick houses built on top of each other." That is how the archaeologist Ian Hodder of Stanford University describes the site known as Çatalhöyük (pronounced cha-tal-HU-yuk) in central Turkey. Hodder has been directing work at the Neolithic site since 1993, but over the past several years, with two major grants from the John Templeton Foundation, he has expanded his research. "We are doing something novel, bringing together people from related disciplines—anthropology, religious studies, philosophy, sociology—so that they can engage first-hand with the site, and interpret it based on their wider understanding of religion."

Hodder estimates that there are some eighteen layers of rebuilt houses at Çatalhöyük, which dates back to approximately 7,500 B.C.E. Many of those layers are extraordinarily well preserved, with skeletons buried beneath the floors and parts of bears and bull horns attached to the walls. (For extensive photos of the site, click here.)
Harvey Whitehouse, a social anthropologist at the University of Oxford and a member of the Çatalhöyük research team, calls the site a "time machine." Its inhabitants, he told the Templeton Report, were "all living on top of one another, literally." Every time they abandoned a house, they collapsed the walls onto the ground. "People knew where to go to find the skull of an ancestor under their floor."

All of which is interesting not only from a historical point of view but from a religious one as well. As Hodder says, "When you have people who are removing skulls from their dead and keeping them, re-plastering them, painting them, and handing them down over generations, it's fairly clear that such evidence is about the spiritual."

Hodder emphasizes that there is still a great deal that his team does not know about the people who lived at Çatalhöyük. "We don't have any names. We don't know what language they spoke. They were probably some form of early Indo-European, but they have no direct link with any people living today." The artifacts and pictorial evidence at the site do suggest, however, "a highly arousing major ritual" going on during the first half of Çatalhöyük's history.