I have been receiving a lot of email from readers of The Goddess and the Bull, which is much appreciated. One reader, impressed with the apparent lack of social hierarchy at Çatalhöyük, asked whether human societies might have been “government-free” during the Neolithic, and perhaps remained so until the rise of urban centers during the Near Eastern Bronze Age, about 5000 years ago. This reader, while not an anarchist, nevertheless did not see government as an entirely positive thing!

It is true that there is no evidence so far of widescale differences in social ranking at Çatalhöyük, although there is limited evidence that the “skull cult” widespread during the Neolithic (and well-known at sites like Jericho in Palestine) was also practiced here. Most archaeologists believe that the skull cult, in which the heads of certain individuals were removed from their bodies before or after their burial under the floors of Neolithic houses, represents some sort of veneration of ancestors or other special individuals (the skull cult is discussed in detail in Chapter 15 of my book, “Till Death US Do Part.”)

Nevertheless, there is a lot of variation from site to site in the evidence for social ranking or differences, even within Anatolia itself. For example, as I mention in Chapter 9 of my book (“The Neolithic Revolution”), the site of Asikli Höyük in Cappadocia, which was founded some 1,000 years before Çatalhöyük, shows clear evidence of a public space or temple complex of some sort, a sign of incipient social divisions because not everyone could have fit into it at the same time; and at Çayönü, an early Neolithic site in southeast Anatolia, archaeologists found a building—which they dubbed the Skull Building—housing the skulls of 288 adults and 106 children. A preliminary study by British bioarchaeologist Jessica Pearson, presented a year ago at an archaeology meeting in Reading, indicated that these individuals may have eaten a better diet than those buried in more ordinary fashion under the floors of Çayönü’s dwellings.

Thus while Çatalhöyük may have been a relatively egalitarian society, the social divisions which are the bane of our existence today may have had deep roots in prehistory.