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Çatalhöyük is described as a “megasite” by archaeologists, and is a large mound made up of the remains of hundreds of prehistoric houses. It is roughly the size of 33 football pitches and at the height of its population would have been home to between 3,000 to 8,000 people.

Houses at Çatalhöyük were single storey with white-washed walls, but if you wanted to visit your friend at their chic Neolithic bungalow, you’d have to enter through a wooden hatch on the roof like everyone else! There were no roads or streets to stroll down, so inhabitants got about by walking across the rooftops and scrambling up and down ladders. Talk about prehistoric parkour!

It was decked out with astonishing art

You might not be able to find any front doors at Çatalhöyük, but you can find a wealth of art. Archaeologists have discovered over 3,000 figurines at Çatalhöyük, installations of animal bones, wonderfully decorated pieces of pottery and painted plaster reliefs. Most of this art depicts wild animals, with one relief showing vultures attacking headless humans. Gorgeous.

They buried bodies under the bed…

Archaeological evidence at Çatalhöyük shows that lots of houses had skeletons buried in the walls, benches, and even under the floor, many of which were right underneath the platforms where inhabitants would have slept. Sweet dreams!

Don’t worry, no prehistoric zombies here! Like many Neolithic communities, death seems to have been very important to the people living at Çatalhöyük and they had lots of rituals around death and burial. Some skulls (or fragments of them) were removed from burials, circulated amongst the community before being reburied in a different place. We can’t be sure why people took part in what we now call skull cults, but it all sounds very goth.