Daily life in Arslantepe during c. 3000 BCE

A grounded look at life on the Malatya plain during the short transition from a mudbrick palace economy to an Early Bronze Age community of huts, animal enclosures, communal storage, herding and conspicuous burial.

Arslantepe is a 30-metre-high tell on the fertile Malatya plain of eastern Anatolia, about 12 kilometres from the upper Euphrates. “Around 3000 BCE” covers a sharp transition rather than one settled social order. The period VIA palace complex, with painted rooms, storerooms and an administration based on clay sealings, was destroyed near the end of the fourth millennium. Period VIB1 occupation followed directly on and among its ruins, bringing wattle-and-daub huts, fenced areas associated with flocks and pottery with strong eastern Anatolian and South Caucasian connections. Building 36, a large mudbrick structure within this settlement, appears to date to about 3100 BCE; the famous stone-built tomb followed at the beginning of the third millennium.

That sequence matters when reconstructing daily life. Palace sealings and mass-produced bowls describe the last phase of the older centralised system, not the organisation of the later hut settlement. For VIB1, the clearest evidence comes from architecture, pottery left where Building 36 burned, grinding equipment, plant and animal remains, a spindle whorl, stone and metal objects, and the exceptional tomb. These sources illuminate storage, food processing, herding and communal events, but they do not provide names, written rules, complete houses or a timetable for an ordinary day. Even the excavators leave open whether Arslantepe was occupied year-round by a partly mobile community or served periodically as a meeting place for several groups.

Housing and Living Spaces

The VIB1 settlement differed visibly from the palace beneath it. Its earliest remains include large open areas with organic deposits, pits and post-holes, interpreted cautiously as animal enclosures and perhaps tents. Later phases had scattered huts of wood and wattle coated with clay; some contained circular fireplaces. Long post-hole fences divided the southern slope into spaces likely used for flocks. These traces support a strong pastoral component, but temporary structures alone cannot prove that every resident was mobile or that the mound stood empty in every season.

Building 36 was exceptional, not a model household. In its developed phase it comprised a large hall and two smaller rooms, covered about 120 square metres, and had mudbrick walls on stone foundations with charred poplar and alder beams. A palisade separated it from an upper area containing a larger hut. The building stood deliberately over an earlier VIA audience building, while ordinary huts spread downslope. Its position, scale, central fireplace and storage capacity suggest a place for meetings, food preparation and collective events as well as practical work.

The fire that destroyed Building 36 preserved an unusually concrete interior. Eighty-three ceramic vessels were reconstructed, including handmade red-black and monochrome burnished wares alongside wheel-made light-coloured vessels. In a small side room, pots stored on the floor and probably on wooden shelving collapsed together. The back room held 59 vessels, mostly jars, and its containers had a potential capacity of about 2,000 litres. A basalt grinding stone, numerous pestles or grinders, clay lids, a small fireplace and two mudbricks used as andirons show that storage and food processing were carried out there.

People therefore inhabited a mound made physically uneven by the fallen walls of the palace. They levelled parts of that debris, set posts into it and placed a new public building above an older one. Moving animals through fences, maintaining clay-coated walls and fireplaces, carrying heavy jars, and keeping stored goods usable were recurring tasks. What sleeping arrangements, furnishings or household membership looked like is much less certain, because the excavated VIB1 evidence is dominated by ephemeral structures and the unusual contents of Building 36.

Food and Daily Meals

Archaeobotanical work across Arslantepe shows a long reliance on cultivated cereals, including barley, emmer and free-threshing wheat, within an economy that combined farming and stock-keeping. Yet the sample from Building 36 is not a pantry inventory for the whole settlement. It contained only small quantities of cereal remains but thousands of gathered wild fruits and seeds, including rowan and cotoneaster fruits found in or beside jars. The excavators suggest that some fruit may have been fermented, but neither the contents of every vessel nor an ordinary meal can be reconstructed securely.

Food preparation itself is clearer than recipes. The grinding stone and cluster of hand tools in the back room of Building 36 indicate pounding or grinding, while three large cooking pots and a fireplace show heating on a scale beyond a single small serving. Jars and fired-clay lids protected foods or liquids for different lengths of time. In daily use, every stored supply still required labour: crops had to be harvested and cleaned, containers filled and moved, fuel collected, fires tended, and implements cleaned or replaced. Archaeology cannot assign all of these tasks to women, men or a particular status group.

The contrast with the destroyed palace is especially revealing. In VIA rooms, thousands of discarded clay sealings recorded the opening of doors, pots, sacks and baskets, while small mass-produced bowls were used for controlled food allocations. Their capacity was too low to represent a complete daily diet, so recipients probably retained other sources of food. Building 36 had substantial storage but no comparable administrative archive and relatively few bowls. Its food and drink appear to have been mobilised periodically for gatherings rather than handed out routinely through the old bureaucracy.

Animal remains reinforce this distinction without yielding a universal diet. Sheep and goat husbandry was prominent in VIB1, and fenced areas on the mound were probably used for flocks. Immediately north of Building 36, thousands of bones—disproportionately meat-rich parts of sheep and goats—were discarded in an open area; this concentration has been interpreted as the refuse from communal meals. It says more about occasional collective consumption than about what each household ate. Dairy use is plausible in a herding economy, but products such as cheese, and their distribution among households, are not directly demonstrated here.

Work and Labor

Herding was central to VIB1 work. The emphasis on sheep and goats, animal pens and temporary construction is consistent with groups that moved at least some flocks seasonally between the plain and upland pasture. It does not establish “nomadism” in a simple sense: Building 36 and repeated hut phases show investment in the mound, and wheel-made pottery points to continued contact with more sedentary farming communities. Cultivation also continued in the Malatya region, so herding, crop work and exchange were interdependent rather than separate ways of life.

Pottery records both continuity and changed labour organisation. Handmade, highly burnished red-black and monochrome vessels associated with Kura-Araxes traditions occur beside wheel-made Plain Simple and Late Reserved Slip wares continuing local VIA techniques. The mixture does not by itself identify the ethnicity of individual potters or users. It does show that containers for cooking, serving and bulk storage moved between communities with different technical traditions, and that Building 36 was a point where those relationships met.

Administrative work belongs chiefly to the preceding palace. Its sealings acted as records after closures were removed from doors or containers, allowing withdrawals to be checked without a written archive. That system would have involved seal holders, storekeepers, food preparers and recipients as well as agricultural producers. After the palace burned, such administrative material is absent from Building 36. Storage and authority continued, but the evidence points to a different rhythm: large stores, meetings and periodic communal consumption rather than routine bureaucratic allocation.

Metalwork was technically accomplished and socially conspicuous, but it should not dominate the picture of labour. Two copper awls, two spearheads and small copper fittings came from Building 36; metal objects were otherwise rare in VIB1 habitation. The so-called Royal Tomb contained a far greater concentration of weapons and ornaments, while the earlier palace produced the celebrated hoard of arsenical-copper swords and spearheads. Those deposits demonstrate access to skilled production and long-distance metal networks, not that most tools in daily use were metal.

Social Structure

Social inequality is clearest before and after the transition in different kinds of evidence. The VIA palace concentrated storage, administration, ceremonial rooms and prestige objects in a restricted complex. VIB1 retained distinctions—Building 36, the palisade and a larger hut stood apart from smaller huts and pens—but there is no written list of offices and no basis for arranging everyone into fixed ranks. Archaeologists variously describe Building 36 as communal, ceremonial or connected with emerging leaders; these are interpretations of its scale, contents and setting rather than a known ancient title.

The mixed character of VIB1 also warns against treating its population as a single uniform group. Specialised herding, handmade Kura-Araxes-related pottery, wheel-made vessels in local traditions and obsidian from several eastern and central Anatolian sources point to movement and interaction. Whether mobile herders occupied the mound permanently while part of the community travelled, or whether several communities gathered there periodically, remains unresolved. The labour and access of farming households in the surrounding plain may therefore have differed from those of the people tending flocks or managing Building 36.

The stone cist conventionally called the “Royal Tomb” makes status visible but does not identify a king. It contained an adult man with an exceptional assemblage of metal weapons and ornaments; four adolescents were arranged on and around the covering slabs. The excavators interpreted them as probable victims of sacrifice, but the precise ritual and the political identity of the central burial remain debated. A recent reassessment stresses how awkwardly such display fits a settlement of huts and mobile pastoral activity and cautions that spectacular funerary ranking need not reproduce the organisation of everyday society.

Age and gender must be handled with similar restraint. Skeletal remains can sometimes estimate age and biological sex, and tools identify activities, but neither provides a reliable gendered division of work for the settlement. A spindle whorl shows that spinning occurred; grinding equipment shows food processing; pens show animal management. They do not reveal who normally performed each task. Children and adults certainly shared a community structured by work, kinship and gatherings, but their routine duties cannot be recovered from the surviving evidence.

Tools and Technology

Surviving VIB1 tools emphasise stone, clay, wood and fibre rather than metal. Building 36 yielded a basalt grinding stone, pestles and grinders, a few flint blades, flint arrowheads, an obsidian arrowhead and a small stone spindle whorl. Poplar and alder roof beams survived because they were charred. Clay served for wall coatings, mudbricks, hearth fittings, lids and vessels. Organic baskets, handles and cloth usually decayed, so their original abundance cannot be counted directly.

Administrative technology was one of the palace's most important features but did not continue unchanged. Wet clay pressed over a door fastening, pot, sack or basket received a seal impression; after the closure was opened, the removed sealing could be retained and later discarded as a record of the transaction. More than 5,000 sealing fragments accumulated in one palace dump, while small bowls provided recognisable portions. Building 36's lack of comparable sealings is therefore positive evidence for a real organisational break, even though people still stored goods and exercised authority.

Obsidian sourcing makes otherwise invisible connections tangible. Analyses show that nearby eastern Anatolian sources around Bingöl supplied most tested material over the site's long sequence, while VIB1 also included stone from more distant north-eastern and central Anatolian sources. Some tools may have arrived as finished pieces or prepared blanks; only material from the nearest source preserves the whole working sequence at Arslantepe. Such results reveal routes and choices, but not whether a particular tool travelled with a herder, an exchange partner or a specialist craftworker.

Clothing and Materials

No complete everyday garment survives from VIB1, so named costume forms, footwear and the relative use of wool, flax or leather cannot be securely reconstructed. A spindle whorl in Building 36 provides direct evidence for making thread, while sheep husbandry made wool available. Spinning was only one stage in textile production, however, and a single tool does not show whether cloth was woven in that building, by whom, or under institutional supervision.

The tomb offers exceptional but socially selective evidence. Metal pins, diadems and other ornaments were placed with the central adult and the four adolescents; a recent reassessment also notes that weapons in the deposit had been wrapped in fabric. These remains show that textiles could support elaborate display in an exceptional setting. They cannot stand for ordinary dress: the very reason the deposit survives and attracts attention is that it was extraordinary.

Pottery provides a fuller record of everyday material choices than clothing. Highly polished red-black vessels received careful surface treatment, while wheel-made wares preserved older local techniques. Jars were repaired or reused as pot stands in Building 36, and shelves allowed containers to occupy scarce floor space. Material culture was therefore maintained and repurposed as well as made anew, a practical consequence of the time invested in obtaining clay, fuel, stone, timber, fibre and metal.

Daily life at Arslantepe around 3000 BCE was shaped by the dismantling of one political economy and the formation of another. The palace's sealed stores and repeated food allocations gave way to huts, flock enclosures and a communal building without an administrative archive, while farming contacts and older craft traditions persisted. Grinding, storage, pottery use, spinning and herding are directly visible; family structure, clothing and the seasonality of residence are not. Arslantepe is valuable precisely because its short sequence preserves both continuity and rupture without reducing either community to a single “typical” life.

References

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Arslantepe Mound. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1622/
Frangipane, Marcella. “The Late Chalcolithic / EB I Sequence at Arslantepe: Chronological and Cultural Remarks from a Frontier Site.” In From the Euphrates to the Caucasus: Chronologies for the 4th–3rd Millennium B.C., Varia Anatolica 11 (2000), pp. 439–471. https://www.persee.fr/doc/anatv_1013-9559_2000_act_11_1_941
Palumbi, Giulio, Corrado Alvaro, Clara Grifoni and Marcella Frangipane, with contributions by Cristiano Vignola and Filippo Terrasi. “A ‘Communal’ Building of the Beginning of the Early Bronze Age at Arslantepe-Malatya (Turkey): Spatio-functional Analysis and Interpretation of the Archaeological Context.” Paléorient 43, no. 1 (2017), pp. 89–123. https://doi.org/10.3406/paleo.2017.5753
D’Anna, Maria Bianca. “Une liaison dangereuse: Mass-produced Bowls and Cretulae at Arslantepe during Period VI A.” In Pathways through Arslantepe: Essays in Honour of Marcella Frangipane, edited by Francesca Balossi Restelli et al. Sapienza Università di Roma and Edizioni Sette Città, 2020, pp. 223–234. Publication record and author-uploaded text
Mouralis, Damase, Massimo Massussi, Giulio Palumbi et al. “The Procurement of Obsidian at Arslantepe (Eastern Anatolia) during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age: Connections with Anatolia and Caucasus.” Quaternary International 467 (2018), pp. 342–359. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2017.11.041
Frangipane, Marcella, Gian Maria Di Nocera, Andreas Hauptmann et al. “New Symbols of a New Power in a ‘Royal’ Tomb from 3000 BC Arslantepe, Malatya (Turkey).” Paléorient 27, no. 2 (2001), pp. 105–139. https://doi.org/10.3406/paleo.2001.4733
Wengrow, David, Brenna Hassett, Haluk Sağlamtimur, William Marsh, Selina Brace, Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch, Emma L. Baysal, Metin Batıhan, İnan Aydoğan, Öznur Özmen Batıhan and Ian Barnes. “Inequality at the Dawn of the Bronze Age: The Case of Başur Höyük, a ‘Royal’ Cemetery at the Margins of the Mesopotamian World.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 35, no. 2 (2025), pp. 293–304. See especially the reassessment of Arslantepe’s tomb and post-palatial setting. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774324000398