The inhabitants of the Stone Age settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey maintained close but unusual contact with their deceased. After their burial, they dug them up several times inside their houses and buried the bones again. In addition, the dead were painted with ocher, cinnabar or green-blue colors – and at the same time the room walls were also given a matching coat of paint, as archaeologists have found. This could indicate some kind of early memory culture.
The Stone Age settlement of Çatalhöyük in Central Anatolia is considered the oldest city in the world. Around 9,000 years ago, people built clay houses close together, the rooms of which were accessed through roof openings. The entire settlement stretched over more than 13 hectares. Typical for this Neolithic city is the painting of the inner walls, stone benches or niches in many houses. The depictions mostly show monochromatic abstract patterns and handprints, but also animal figures. This “art in construction” is one of the defining characteristics of Çatalhöyük.
House floor as a burial place
A second peculiarity of the residents of Çatalhöyük is the then common practice of burying deceased relatives under the floor of the living quarters. “Adults were often buried in a hunched position under the north and east platforms of the central room,” report Eline Schotsmans of the University of Bordeaux and her colleagues. Burial sites were more variable for deceased children. Early excavations also indicated that many of the dead bore traces of pigments, including ocher and vermilion.
Schotsmans and her team have now investigated in more detail when the residents of Çatalhöyük used these colors for their dead, which dead were decorated in this way and whether there was a connection to the wall paintings on the houses. To do this, they evaluated the data on a total of 816 dead bodies discovered in Çatalhöyük and first determined whether it was a primary burial of a “fresh dead” or a reburial of only the bones or the skull. Then they examined whether there were traces of pigments on the dead, what color they were and whether there was a connection to age, gender or other characteristics of the dead. For the first time, the archaeologists also determined whether there was a connection between the treatment of the dead and the wall paintings in Çatalhöyük.
Cinnabar for men, green and blue for women
The analyzes revealed that only a small proportion of the dead in the Neolithic settlement showed traces of pigment. A good three quarters of these were the bones of the deceased who had been wrapped in mats or other fabrics shortly after their death and buried in the floor of the residential buildings. From the distribution of the traces of color, the archaeologists also conclude that these pigments were probably applied or sprinkled onto the skin or the covering of the dead as part of death rituals. However, there were also reburials of skeletons or single bones where the bones had apparently been stained. Why some dead were colored while others were not is still unclear. “Our study shows that this selection is not related to age or gender,” says senior author Marco Milella.
However, closer analysis showed that the use of the various pigments followed certain patterns: “The application of cinnabar seems to have been reserved mainly for dead men,” report Schotsmans and her colleagues. In many cases, the skulls of these deceased showed a colored stripe on the forehead and temples. “This could indicate the former presence of a headband,” the archaeologists write. Such headbands were and are a sign of high social status in many cultures, as they explain. In addition, the intense and consistent red of vermilion was often reserved for the elite in earlier times. In contrast, green and blue pigments were found only in female dead and children. “These colors are sometimes associated with concepts of growth, fertility and range,” the scientists explain.
Wall decoration and burial closely linked
And the archaeologists found another connection: the residential buildings in which the dead were buried almost always showed colored wall paintings. The more bones were found in a room, the more layers of paint were found on the walls. “This suggests that the number of layers of painted plaster on the walls is linked to the number of burials in the room,” Schotsmans and her team explain. In their view, this suggests that the death rituals of the people of Çatalhöyük may have involved repainting the walls.
“For the first time, we are showing connections between burial rituals, living areas and the use of dyes in this fascinating society,” says Milella. The archaeologists suspect that this link could possibly have been part of an early culture of remembrance. Visual expressions, ritual acts, and symbolic associations were apparently elements of a common sociocultural practice in this Neolithic culture.
Source: University of Bern, specialist article: Scientific Reports, doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-07284-3