How many people lived in the world’s earliest villages? Reconsidering community size and population pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük

Abstract

Adopting a building and village biography approach combining archaeology and ethnography, we critically reevaluate the historical argument that Neolithic villages were occupied by many thousands of people. Focusing on the settlement at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, where it has been argued that 3,500 and 10,000 people lived in the village, we argue that this is a significant overestimate of the number of people that occupied this settlement. Drawing upon revised distribution of residential buildings across the mound, and employing archaeological and ethnographic data exploring building life-history, we estimate that between 600 and 800 people would have lived at Çatalhöyük East during an average year during the Middle (6700–6500 cal BC) phase. This research highlights the need to critically revaluate historical population estimates for Neolithic villages, the importance of developing explicit population modeling methods in archaeology, and to reconsider population-driven evolutionary models linking the Near Eastern Neolithic to urbanism.