© Peter Watson 2017 every season and perhaps every month, in a white, marl slurry, carefully prepared and applied. But houses were now frequently burned. Çatalhöyük was a place where houses mattered, well beyond the practical aspects. The continuity of houses was a major value and there was continual maintenance to keep houses the same over time. At Çatalhöyük all houses were domestic (ie., not ceremonial), but not all houses were equal. More people were buried in certain buildings and in some cases more people were buried than could have lived there. Long-lived houses amassed bucrania etc., and some house sequences lasted 500 years. There could be four-to-six rebuilds, each rebuild lasting 70-100 years = 280-600 years. Some houses ‘failed’. ‘People began to link themselves to specific pasts.’ They remembered people as distinct persons, rather than as members of a group. Some figurine deposits show that buildings have individual biographies. There are some memories of the foundation of houses; some houses had several generations of nuclear families. ‘There was an increasing concentration of reproductive power in a limited number of houses.’ The skull of a renowned guardian was buried with one who took over those capacities in a later generation. Did the clustering of houses indicate kinship? In Çatalhöyük, the visible and invisible, presence and absence, are important themes. At ‘Ain Ghazal two-headed figurines make their appearance. The Neolithic was marked by a massive increase in the sheer quantity of things made by people. These are examples of agenthood. The switch from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic world marked a change from a world untouched to a world full of ‘theatres of memory’. There was a massive increase in enduring materiality, a change in the relation between humans and objects. There was an increasing independence of the house in Çatalhöyük. The particular material mattered more than the universal. There was also a move from bucrania to narrative wall paintings. In later levels elaborate houses were no longer as central or as connected as before. But there was an increase in reproductive power in a limited number of houses. And there is evidence of controlled burning.