Talking about cities in the Stone Age seems like an oxymoron. But up to 10,000 people lived in Çatalhöyük, in Turkey, about 8,000-9,000 years ago. This makes it the largest known settlement from what archaeologists call the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods.
Lise Bender Jørgensen is an archaeologist and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Historical and Classical Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and has helped confirm what the inhabitants of the ancient city wove their clothes with.
Some experts believed that people made their clothes from wool. Others thought they were made of linen. In fact, they have been discussing the type of clothing that was worn in Çatalhöyük since 1962, when the first pieces of cloth were found. Who was right? After nearly 60 years, we now know the answer. Neither say Bender Jørgensen and her colleagues, who have presented her findings in the journal Antiquity .
When Çatalhöyük was excavated starting in the late 1950s, it was considered one of the oldest cities. Although new discoveries show that this is no longer true, the place still has a high celebrity factor says Jorgensen. Archaeologist James Mellaart led the first excavations. Turkish authorities later expelled him from the country for allegedly being involved in the sale of archaeological objects on the black market.
People already lived here more than 9,000 years ago, and 18 settlement layers have been identified. People called the city home until about 7,950 years ago. One of the world's leading archaeologists, Professor Ian Hodder of Stanford University, conducted further excavations between 1993 and 2017. These excavations have yielded a wealth of new data and given us a whole new understanding of the site.
Findings by Hodder and his colleagues unearthed several pieces of cloth that were later found to be between 8,500 and 8,700 years old. When Hodder's excavations began to reveal tissues, I was invited to examine them with my Swiss colleague Antoinette Rast-Eicher says Bender Jørgensen. Rast-Eicher, affiliated with the University of Bern, specializes in the identification of textile fibers. She has experience with some of the oldest European fabrics found in alpine lakes. The two researchers have collaborated on several projects in recent years.
In August 2017, they traveled together to Çatalhöyük and examined the textiles that archaeologists from Hodder's group had found. They also collaborated with postdoctoral fellow and archaeobotanist Sabine Karg of the Free University of Berlin. This group of specialists found clear answers.
In the past, researchers largely neglected the possibility that the fabric fibers could be something other than wool or linen, but lately another material has received more attention , says Bender Jørgensen. Bast fibers have been used for thousands of years to make rope and, in turn, yarn and cloth. The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük used different varieties of exactly this material.
A fiber sample from one basket turned out to be grass, but several of the weaves are clearly made from oak bast fiber. In addition, they are the oldest fabrics that are preserved in the world. Bast fiber is found between the bark and the wood of trees such as willow, oak or linden. The inhabitants of Catalhöyük used the bark of the oak, so they made their clothes with the bark of the trees they found in their environment. They also used oak wood as a building material for their houses, and no doubt harvested the bast fibers when the trees were felled.
The experts' conclusions also coincide with another striking point:Large amounts of flaxseed have not been found in the region. The inhabitants of Çatalhöyük do not seem to have cultivated flax. Bender Jørgensen points out that many people often overlook bast fiber as a raw material. Linen tends to dominate the debate about the types of textile fibers people used . It turns out that the inhabitants of this area did not import flax from elsewhere, as many researchers previously thought, but rather used the resources to which they had abundant access.