41 The Nature of Çatalhöyük Chapter 4 The Nature of Çatalhöyük: People and their Changing Environments on the Konya Plain mechanisms of story-telling and myth for the longer- range periods. These stories and myths are capable of encoding much information about culturally-ac- ceptable strategies for overcoming droughts, famines and floods or other major events which might impact the resources upon which populations might depend (Butzer 1982; McIntosh et al. 2000). These would hopefully reflect back in the archaeological record on the resources exploited by a given population during times of environmental change. Spatial changes occur as the distributions of re- sources across the landscape fluctuate on timescales from seasonal to interannual and longer. Small spatial changes might not greatly disrupt the seasonal round of exploitation, scheduling and the distribution of tasks across the landscape in the vicinity of the site. However, major changes could interrupt activities to the point of the population finding it necessary to alter the location of the site itself. There is a continual dynamic between fluctuating environmental regimes, human perceptions of these fluctuations, and chang- ing cultural responses to this fluid environmental setting. Thus, this chapter is aimed at reconstructing the environmental changes in the vicinity of Çatal- höyük through time and attempting to understand the choices made by the inhabitants of the Konya Plain in their responses to these natural and human- induced transformations of landscapes and biota of the region. Modern landscape associations in the site vicinity A brief description of the modern landscape is a neces- sary baseline for understanding landscape settings in the past and the degrees of fluctuation possible at all scales of environmental settings. The Konya Plain is a mosaic of diverse micro- environments each with its associated plant and Arlene Rosen & Neil Roberts with a note on modelling field location by Peter Donovan The people of Çatalhöyük were intimately bound to the landscape and environment of the Konya Plain and surrounding territory. As with all populations of pre-industrial societies, the choices these people made in the selection of exploitable resources were based upon a balance of physical need and cultural preference. Many of the studies in this series of vol- umes on Çatalhöyük have aimed at understanding which resources were exploited by the population of the site by quantifying their presence in the ar- chaeological deposits. In this attempt to understand which components of the natural world were selected and which were not, and how these resources were collected, produced and used, we hope to be a little closer to understanding aspects of the world view of this population with respect to their relationship with the natural world of which they were a part. In order to do this, it is first necessary to reconstruct the landscape as it existed outside of the site context. This will help provide us with an approximate baseline of available floral, faunal, and earth resources as well as an understanding of how this environment might have fluctuated with changing climates and human land-use patterns. Many traditional studies of landscape and envi- ronments associated with archaeological sites present the surrounding natural world as a static entity, almost as a stage setting functioning only as a backdrop to hu- man events. There is nothing static about landscapes and the biota which they contain. Landscapes fluctu- ate at different temporal and spatial scales with small- scale changes occurring on a year-by-year basis and longer-scale change at the rate of tens of thousands of years. Human perceptions of this change extend over the shorter term scale with individual memory lasting only the length of a human lifetime. However, this memory or perception of environmental change is extended by societies over generations through the