Çatalhöyük

They are right beneath you. You know this because you put them there. Your grandmother is under the floor of the room where you sleep, where you eat, where you are born, where you will one day be placed yourself. Not buried outside the walls in a separate country of the dead — under the floor. The bones of the people who made you are the foundation of the house that holds you. Çatalhöyük: eighteen layers of city, each one built on the rubble of the last, and running through all of it, under every hearth, beneath every sleeping mat, the dead. Archaeologists found them still curled in the positions of sleep. Some had been buried, dug up again years later, passed from house to house — the skull of a grandmother carried to a cousin's home across the city, painted red, kept. What does it mean to live like this? The dead are not gone. They are not elsewhere. They are the literal ground of your world, and the ground can be reopened. Something about this arrangement made Çatalhöyük work — eight thousand people living in a city with no streets, no hierarchy anyone can find in the archaeology, no palace, no temple separate from the home. The house is the temple. The floor is the altar. And somewhere below you, your mother is listening.