Archaeologists discover 8600-year-old bread at Çatalhöyük

KONYA

Archaeologists have discovered nearly 8,600-year-old bread in the Çatalhöyük Neolithic settlement, one of the first places of urban settlement in the world in central Anatolian province of Konya. The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012.

Full of densely packed mud brick houses covered in paintings and symbolic decorations, Çatalhöyük’s population hovered around 8,000, which made it one of the biggest settlements of its era. People, mud-brick homes through ceiling doors, and they navigated sidewalks that wound around the city’s rooftops.

Archaeologists have discovered an oven structure in the area called “Mekan 66” (Place 66). Around the largely destroyed oven, wheat, barley, pea seeds, and a handful find that could be food were found.

Analyses conducted at Necmettin Erbakan University Science and Technology Research and Application Center (BITAM) determined that the spongy residue was fermented bread from 6,600 B.C.

“The small and round spongy find in the corner of the oven was found to be bread after careful documentation. The fact that the structure was covered with a thin clay allowed all of these organic remains, both wooden and bread, to be preserved until today. Radiocarbon tests conducted at the TÜBITAK Marmara Research Center [MAM] showed that our sample can be dated back to approximately 6,600 B.C.,” said the head of the excavation committee and Anadolu University faculty member Associate Professor Ali Umut Türkcan, and continued:

“We can say that this finds from Çatalhöyük is the oldest bread in the world. It is a reduced version of loaf bread. It has a finger pressed in the center, it was not baked, but it was fermented and came to the present day with the starches inside. There is no such example. Çatalhöyük was already the center of many firsts.”