If you’ve ever glimpsed the inside of a Çatalhöyük house you will never forget it: central living rooms, no more than sixteen feet across, with the skulls and horns of cattle and other creatures projecting inwards from the walls, and sometimes outwards from the fittings and furnishings. Many rooms also had vivid wall paintings and figurative mouldings, and contained platforms under which resided some portion of the household dead – remains of between six and sixty individuals in any given house – propping up the living.
