About James Mellaart
James Mellaart FBA was a British and Dutch archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market. After his death, it was discovered that Mellaart had forged many of his "finds", including murals and inscriptions from the Çatalhöyük site. It was Mellaart who first introduced the term "Luwian" to archaeological discourse in the 1950s. However, many other archaeologists did not agree with him, and the dispute created a controversy. According to Mellaart, the earliest Indo-Europeans in northwest Anatolia were the horse-riders who came to this region from the north and founded Demircihöyük in Eskişehir Province, Turkey, in ancient Phrygia, c. 3000 BCE.
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