ABSTRACT
The notion of ‘history houses’ at Çatalhöyük has been challenged in recent years, but new results from the site confirm evidence for a statistical correlation between long-lasting, multiply rebuilt houses and large numbers of burials beneath house floors. Such buildings are often more elaborate in that they have installations of animal parts that can again be seen as building histories. While the notion of history houses has been confirmed, there has been increasing evidence of cases in which histories are forgotten, erased or contested. In addition, there are now several cases in which history house sequences begin not with houses but with burials or ‘cemeteries’. This new evidence suggests that the primary focus of history-making at Çatalhöyük may not have been so much the houses, but the social relations that were built as burials were stacked on burials. History-making at Çatalhöyük thus seems to have been about establishing, contesting and rewriting the social relations between people at any one moment in time. This evidence is situated in terms of history-making processes throughout the Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic in the Middle East.
