The seasonality of wetland and riparian taskscapes at Çatalhöyük

The Neolithic inhabitants of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia used local wetland and riparian environments for a variety of different tasks throughout the site’s occupation. These tasks tended to vary throughout the year as different resources became available and residents organized their labor to focus on particular tasks. The authors summarize paleoenvironmental and archaeological data from recent analyses at Çatalhöyük to describe how the use of wetland and riparian environments fluctuated over the course of a typical year at Neolithic Çatalhöyük, as well as how these patterns changed over the course of the site’s occupation. Çatalhöyük’s later residents reorganized the ways in which they interacted with their surrounding landscape and managed labor demands as livelihoods and experiences became more varied across the community, which impacted the regularity and variety of uses they had for local wetland and riparian environments.