As most of you probably know, Catal Huyuk is the site of a long-abandoned town of southern Turkey, now but a mound . First excavated by James Mellaart from 1961 to 1963, he discovered 12 occupation levels and used the method of radio carbon dating to determine the first settlement to be c 6500 BC and the last c. 5700 BC, thus considering the whole time of settlement to be 800 years. Both the dates and the time of occupation are what I am taking issue with. But just to remind you all: The houses were built of sun-dried brick with wooden framing. They were unique in that they were all connected to one another so that there were no streets in between them; they were all touching each other to form a single compound. Access was by way ofladders to the roof where the entrances were. For the purpose of chronology, the walls of these houses were covered with white plaster and so the number of layers speak of time, albeit, with an assumed frequency of plastering. Also the dead were buried beneath the houses and the number of burials hints at the number of generations between rebuilding the houses. Mellaart claimed that the physical evidence agreed well with the C-14 dating of the settlement. The non-c-14 physical evidence is that which gives an indication of the life-span of a house, as rationalized by the plasterings and the number of dead buried beneath them, as above, and multiplied by the number of levels. Though I believe most archaeologists are generally agreed that buildings made of sun-dried brick have short lives – a generation, more or less, depending on climate – Mellaart believes the buildings at Catal Huyuk lasted 120 years because of the way they were built --side by side. To protect them from rain and snow, the inhabitants replastered them periodically and the number of layers of plaster per house agrees with Mellaart’s dates if the climate today is the same as it was back then, however this is an assumption. If we take a generation to be 30 years, then by his reckoning 4 generations lived in each house before it was torn down and rebuilt. Even most houses of modern times have not lasted that long. Then there is the question of how many dead were buried beneath each house. This should provide a clue as to how many people lived in them. There is an average of three skeletons per house. Mellaart admits this not enough to justify 120 years per house. Hence, in this case, the physical evidence actually shows a short duration for the settlement. Three people probably represents a generation and so the houses were actually rebuilt back then as often as sun-dried brick houses are today, if not more often. A generation per house gives us a total of 360 years as the time span for the whole settlement. To corroborate this, if we take the Biblical date of the Dispersion -- c. 2150 BC -- as the probable date for the settlement of Catal Huyuk and proportionally reduce the carbon dates, we get a span of 265 years. Thus the settlement may be dated tentatively from 2150 to 1885 BC. I know my need for Christ