Archaeologists uncover human settlement dated to the dawn of civilization

Aşıklı Höyük, a mound near the banks of the Melendiz River in southern Turkey, lies not far from the site of Çatalhöyük. Dated to about 7500 B.C., Çatalhöyük is famous for being one of the oldest and largest Neolithic sites ever found.

But Aşıklı Höyük dates back even earlier, to about 8000 B.C. Though less known and considerably smaller than Çatalhöyük, archaeological excavations at Aşıklı Höyük have revealed a richly informative window on small-town life about 10,000 years ago, long before the pyramids, ziggurats, palaces, and other monumental features of the emerging, more expansive ancient cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt emerged on the landscape.

First investigated by Professor Ian A. Todd in 1964, full-scale excavations of the site didn’t take place until 1989 under Ufuk Esin of the University of Istanbul. It became one of the largest excavations of the region, and is still the subject of archaeological investigations and research. The site finds included simple adobe house structures for a total of at least 400 rooms and as many as 70 burials beneath the house floors. The 1-to-2-room houses typically featured hearths, some houses with built-in earthen benches. Curiously, the houses were relatively dark inside, built essentially without doors and windows.

“These houses had no door for entry,” stated Heval Bozbay, who has been a member of the Aşıklı Höyük research team since 2009. “To enter a house, they had to ascend an exterior ladder and go inside through an opening in the roof, then descend an interior ladder. The only source of light was the opening in the roof one used to enter, and one or two holes in a wall, far too small to be called a window by modern standards.”


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C5%9F%C4%B1kl%C4%B1_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/summer-2015/article/archaeologists-uncover-human-settlement-dated-to-the-dawn-of-civilization