CHAPTER 12 The People and Their Landscape(s) Changing Mobility Patterns at Neolithic Çatalhöyük JOSHUA W. SADVARI,MICHAEL CHARLES,CHRISTOPHER B. RUFF,TRISTAN CARTER,MILENA VASIĆ, CLARK SPENCER LARSEN,DANIELLA E. BAR-YOSEF MAYER AND CHRIS DOHERTY INTRODUCTION The Neolithic is a pivotal and dynamic period of Near Eastern prehistory, being marked by changes in the ways that human beings interacted with their environments and with one another. The leading developments included a series of interlinked changes, especially the domestication of plants and animals and subsequent intensification of agricultural practices, increased sedentism, population growth and aggrega- tion, greater entanglement with and dependence upon material resources, and increased emphasis on ritual and symbolic behaviours (e.g. Bar-Yosef & Meadow, 1995; Banning, 1998; Cauvin, 2000; Kuijt, 2000; Simmons, 2007). While each of these aspects has received thorough treatment through archaeological analysis, the processes underlying increased sedentism have been a particular focus of the study. This is due, in large part, to other dramatic changes associated with and possibly precipitated by reduced mobility, including changes in subsistence strategies, storage practices, trade, demographic structure, sexual division of labour, sociopolitical differentiation, and notions of material wealth, privacy, ownership, co-operation, and competition (Kelly, 1992 and references therein). Bioarchaeologists, in their analyses of human skeletal remains from archaeological settings, have devoted a great deal of attention to explaining examples of reduced mobility among populations in transition— especially the foraging-to-farming transition—because of the largely negative consequences that increased sedentism and population aggregation brought about for human health (Larsen, 2015 and references therein). Through these studies, much has been learned about the general trend of reduced mobility that accompanies the transition from foraging to farming in various places and times. However, less attention has been paid to the factors affecting changing mobility patterns within established farming communities (cf. Larsen & Ruff, 1994; Ruff & Larsen, 2001). The lengthy occupation, detailed stratigraphy and contextual data, and large assemblage of human remains at Çatalhöyük provide an opportunity to evaluate temporal changes in mobility patterns within a farming community in a way that is difficult or impossible in many other archaeological settings worldwide. In the present analysis, mobility at Çatal- höyük will be analysed at two different scales, first in a broader temporal and geographic context, via compari- son with skeletal series spanning the European Upper Paleolithic to the Bronze Age, and second through the local chronology of the site, to capitalize on the unique opportunity provided at Çatalhöyük and dis- cussed above. While we predict that the first scale of analysis will reveal Çatalhöyük to be a relatively seden- tary population, it is important to recall the words of Robert Kelly (1992: 60) when considering the second scale of analysis, namely that, ‘No society is sedentary […] – people simply move in different ways’. THE LANDSCAPE OF ÇATALHÖYÜK Mobility patterns are greatly influenced by the relationship shared between people and their land- scapes—regional, local, physical, and social. Through this relationship, people shape their landscapes, and landscapes, in turn, shape their people. Çatalhöyük is no different in this regard, and before moving into the analyses discussed in the previous section, it is impor- tant to consider what is currently known about the landscape within which the site was located. The landscape reconstruction that emerged during the first phase of the Çatalhöyük Research Project painted a picture of a dynamic, if predictable, environ- ment characterized by continuous seasonally flooded wetlands throughout the site’s Neolithic occupation (Roberts et al., 1996, 2007; Rosen & Roberts 2005; Roberts & Rosen, 2009). Under this model, Çatal- höyük is described as having been founded upon a © European Association of Archaeologists 2015