In my research focused on early farmers of Europe, I have often wondered about a curious pattern through time: Farmers lived in large dense villages, then dispersed for centuries, then later formed cities again, only to abandon those as well. Why?
Archaeologists often explain what we call urban collapse in terms of climate change, overpopulation, social pressures or some combination of these. Each likely has been true at different points in time.
But scientists have added a new hypothesis to the mix: disease. Living closely with animals led to zoonotic diseases that came to also infect humans. Outbreaks could have led dense settlements to be abandoned, at least until later generations found a way to organize their settlement layout to be more resilient to disease. In a new study, my colleagues and I analyzed the intriguing layouts of later settlements to see how they might have interacted with disease transmission.
Çatalhöyük, in present-day Turkey, is the world’s oldest farming village, from over 9,000 years ago. Many thousands of people lived in mud-brick houses jammed so tightly together that residents entered via a ladder through a trapdoor on the roof. They even buried selected ancestors underneath the house floor. Despite plenty of space out there on the Anatolian Plateau, people packed in closely.
For centuries, people at Çatalhöyük herded sheep and cattle, cultivated barley and made cheese. Evocative paintings of bulls, dancing figures and a volcanic eruption suggest their folk traditions. They kept their well-organized houses tidy, sweeping floors and maintaining storage bins near the kitchen, located under the trapdoor to allow oven smoke to escape. Keeping clean meant they even replastered their interior house walls several times a year.
These rich traditions ended by 6000 BCE, when Çatalhöyük was mysteriously abandoned. The population dispersed into smaller settlements out in the........