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The surrounding countryside offered wild food sources, such as apples, almonds, pistachios, fish, and waterfowl eggs. Building materials such as plaster and mud were also readily available near the settlement itself. Archaeologists were surprised to find that homes were not located close to their fields, which was unexpected for an agricultural community of several thousand people.

According to Hodder and his team, one possible explanation lies in the high demand for plaster and clay in the village. If people lived closer to their farmland, they would have been forced to travel to get clay to build their homes.

The cane baskets they used to transport it were unsuited to hauling vast quantities over large stretches of territory. It was easier to transport their harvests and store them. Archaeologists found baskets of date palm leaves that originated from Mesopotamia or the Levant.

Shells suggest they traded with peoples near the Red Sea or the Mediterranean. Interiors were often decorated with bull horns, and main rooms often featured a hearth, an oven, and sleeping platforms. Archaeologists believe this lack suggests a remarkably egalitarian society—at least in its earlier stages. However, the people who lived in these homes did not control food production, nor were their burials more elaborate than others. It is thought they served to keep the historical and cultural memory of the community alive.

There are also many mysteries surrounding why the site was eventually abandoned. Evidence suggests that the social system gradually broke down due to cultural shifts and climate change. In the later period, archaeologists detected an increase in the differences dividing social classes. Homes were no longer the center of ritual and social relations and became centers of production and consumption. Archaeologists are still searching for explanations.

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Some microscopic plant residue evidence suggests that flowers and fruit may have been included in some of the burials, and some were buried with textile shrouds or baskets. Mellaart classed the buildings into two groups: residential structures and shrines, using internal decoration as an indicator of a given room's religious importance. Hodder had another idea: he defines the special buildings as History Houses.

History Houses are those were reused again and again rather than rebuilt, some for centuries, and also included decorations. Decorations are found in both History Houses and shorter-lived buildings that don't fit Hodder's category. They include murals, paintwork and plaster images on walls and plastered posts.

The murals are solid red panels or bands of color or abstract motifs such as handprints or geometric patterns. Some have figural art, images of humans, aurochs , stags, and vultures. The animals are shown much larger in scale than humans, and most of the humans are depicted without heads. One famous wall painting is that of a birdseye map of the East Mound, with a volcanic eruption illustrated above it. These are molded or set onto the wall or mounted onto the benches or at the edges of platforms; they typically were re-plastered several times, perhaps when deaths occurred.

Portable art from the site includes about 1, figurines so far, half of which are in the shape of people, and half are four-legged animals of some sort. These were recovered from a range of different contexts, both internal and external to buildings, in middens or even part of the walls.

Although Mellaart generally described these as classic " mother goddess figurines ," the figurines also include such as stamp seals—objects intended to impress patterns into clay or other material, as well as anthropomorphic pots and animal figurines. Radivojevic and colleagues have shown that what Mellaart interpreted as copper slag was more likely accidental. Copper metal minerals in a burial context were baked when a post-depositional fire occurred in the dwelling.

The earliest phase of occupation in the East Mound happened when the local environment was in the process of changing from humid to dryland conditions.

There is evidence that the climate changed considerably during the length of the occupation, including drought periods. The move to the West Mound occurred when there appeared a localized wetter area southeast of the new site.

Scholars now believe that agriculture at the site was relatively local, with small-scale herding and farming that varied throughout the Neolithic. Plants used by the occupants included four different categories. The farming strategy was remarkably innovative.

Rather than maintaining a fixed set of crops to rely on, the diverse agro-ecology enabled generations of cultivators to maintain flexible cropping strategies. They shifted the emphasis on the category of food as well as on elements within the categories as circumstances warranted. Selected Sources. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.

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