More on history houses at Çatalhöyük: A response to Carleton et al.

In a recent article in this journal, Carleton et al. (2013) cast doubt on a hypothesis about the social organization of the Neolithic tell site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The hypothesis concerns 'history houses' that were continually built in the same place and in which many interments occurred. Carleton et al. argue that the history house hypothesis 'contends that the corporate kin-group was the main form of socioeconomic organization at Çatalhöyük during the PPNB, and that the corporate kin-groups would have been maintained by the repeated rebuilding of houses in the same place and by the burial of important members under the floors of the houses' (Carleton et al., 2013, 1821). They test the history house hypothesis by examining the relationship between continuity of houses and the percentage of houses that contain burial. The purpose of this response is to (a) clarify the hypothesis, (b) show that the claimed test does not test the hypothesis, and (c) demonstrate that poor and out-of-date data were used. Data are presented that go some way to confirm a link between 'history houses' and burial at Çatalhöyük and reinforce wider scholarly discussion of Neolithic history and memory making.