James Mellaart FBI (14 November 1925 – 29 July 2012) was a British-Dutch prehistorian and archaeologist. From 1959 to 1961 he was deputy director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA), then lecturer in prehistoric archaeology at Istanbul University until 1963. In 1964 he became lecturer in Anatolian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London retiring in 1991. His discoveries at Hacılar, Beycesultan and Çatalhöyük left a lasting mark on prehistoric archaeology; over his career, however, Mellaart also built an extensive system of forgeries to support interpretations that were often speculative from the outset, deliberately trading on his considerable scholarly standing to lend these constructions an appearance of credibility—a strategy that, in retrospect, devalues even his genuine achievements. His manipulations bred distrust among colleagues and at times demonstrably hampered his further career, yet the full extent of his fabrications only became public after his death, not least because of systematic institutional concealment.
Biography Origins, education and early formation James Mellaart was born in London. Mellaart's father, Jacob Herman Jan Mellaart (1895–1972), a Dutch-born art expert, had moved to England shortly before his son's birth; his mother, Apollonia Dingena ("Linn") née van der Beek (1886 or 1899–1933), was from Ulster but also of Dutch descent.Charles Burney: James Mellaart (1925–2012). In: Paléorient 38/1–2 (2012), pp. 11–12, at p. 11. Like his sister, Mellaart held dual nationality by virtue of his London birth; Alan Mellaart: The Life of James Mellaart. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 33–103, at p. 45. Mellaart had a younger sister, born also in London four Years after him.Alan Mellaart: The Life of James Mellaart. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 33–103, at p. 33. He later claimed descent from Clan Donald (the MacLarty line) via Scotland, with the family moving to Holland in the late seventeenth century and Dutchifying its name—a claim not universally credited.Charles Burney: James Mellaart (1925–2012). In: Paléorient 38/1–2 (2012), pp. 11–12, at p. 11; Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at p. 411; Eberhard Zangger: James Mellaart's Fantasies. In: Talanta 50 (2018/19), pp. 125–182, at p. 130. The father's advisory work for art collectors afforded the family a comfortable house in Chelsea, but the collapse of the art market in the Great Depression forced a return to Amsterdam in 1932.Michael Balter: The Goddess and the Bull, New York et al. 2005, p. 12.
After his mother's death from gas poisoning in 1933,Alan Mellaart: The Life of James Mellaart. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 33–103, at p. 37. the father married the children's nanny and had four more sons with her.Ibid. James and his sister harboured a lifelong aversion to their stepmother—he did not even attend her 1986 funeral—a hostility that may explain his suppression of his Dutch youth, his refusal to speak Dutch with Dutch colleagues, and his insistence, denying his Dutch ancestry, on a Scottish identity.Charles Burney: James Mellaart (1925–2012). In: Paléorient 38/1–2 (2012), pp. 11–12, at p. 11; Eberhard Zangger: James Mellaart's Fantasies. In: Talanta 50 (2018/19), pp. 125–182, at p. 130; Alan Mellaart: The Life of James Mellaart. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 33–103, at pp. 37, 81.
In the years that followed, the family moved repeatedly within the Netherlands—from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, then to The Hague, and, during the German occupation, to Maastricht. To evade forced labour service, Mellaart, through a friend of his father's, obtained a post at the Netherlands National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden: a letter of application dropping the names of numerous museum staff and archaeologists so impressed the museum's director that a position was created specially for the unqualified eighteen-year-old. His later claim that the Swiss consul had arranged the post cannot be substantiated, nor can his account of recovering an unexploded V-2 rocket during the war and handing it over to a senior American military officer. Mellaart was apparently unaware that a V-2 was 14 meters long. In early September 1944 he returned to the family home in the southern Netherlands, ten days before the Americans entered Maastricht. After the liberation he took up the study of Egyptology and classical antiquity at Leiden and agreed to end his museum contract as of 1 October 1944; six months later, however, he unsuccessfully tried to have the agreement reversed and to claim back pay through May 1945 via a committee set up to resolve occupation-related grievances, causing irritation among a museum staff closely tied to the university's Egyptology and Classics departments and possibly damaging his standing as a student. He is said to have already acquired the ability to read Egyptian hieroglyphs while at the museum. At grammar school he had learned German, English, French, Latin and Ancient Greek; from a paternal uncle he also acquired Gaelic.Michael Balter: The Goddess and the Bull, New York et al. 2005, pp. 12f.; Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at p. 411; Vladimir Stissi: What is Drawn and Written is not Necessarily True. Contextualising Mellaart's Fakes. In: Talanta 50 (2018/19), pp. 87–123, at pp. 90f.; Alan Mellaart: The Life of James Mellaart. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 33–103, at p. 43; Enrico Giannichedda: Il tesoro di Dorak, Archeo inchiesta, Bari 2023.
From 1947 he studied archaeology at University College London,Michael Balter: The Goddess and the Bull, New York et al. 2005, p. 13. joining excavations under Kathleen Kenyon at Sutton Walls and developing an early interest in the Sea Peoples and the twelfth-century BC collapse of the Bronze Age order, as well as the spread of Early Bronze Age cultures across the eastern Mediterranean.Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at p. 411. A doctoral project on the Sea Peoples, claimed to have begun in 1951, was never submitted.James Mellaart: Letters to the Editors. In: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Society 12 (1993), pp. 81f. According to his son, Mellaart deemed no one qualified to assess the work; Eberhard Zangger: Die Luwier und der Trojanische Krieg, Zurich 2017, p. 205.
Scientific beginnings After graduating in 1951, Mellaart received a two-year fellowship at the BIAA, becoming its deputy director under Seton Lloyd in 1959, a post he held until 1961, before serving as lecturer in prehistoric archaeology at Istanbul University from 1961 to 1963. In 1964 he was appointed lecturer in Anatolian archaeology at UCL's Institute of Archaeology, remaining there until his retirement in 1991. During his BIAA years he surveyed numerous prehistoric sites across southwestern Anatolia and developed into an outstanding "site-spotter", able to recognise buried prehistoric settlements from slight surface undulations. In the course of this fieldwork he discovered hundreds of pre-classical sites, among them the major Chalcolithic and Bronze Age settlement of Beycesultan.Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at pp. 411–413; idem: Mellaart, James. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, January 2016 [accessed 21 June 2026]; David Stronach: Working with Jimmy and Arlette Mellaart, 1955 to 1958. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 271–275, at pp. 271f.
In this period he met Arlette Meryem CenaniBiography: Alan Mellaart: Arlette Mellaart. A Journey to Archaeology. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 103–120. (1924–2013), daughter of Marie Rosenthal (1897–1976), of a distinguished Istanbul Jewish family of Italian descent, and the non-practising Romanian Jew Beno Coppelovici. Marie left Beno around 1932 for Kadri Cenani, a Turkish businessman from a family of prominent Ottoman statesmen; she converted to Islam and married Kadri in Marseille in 1939, whereupon Coppelovici took his own life. In 1941 Kadri adopted Arlette.On her family tree see Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 14f. Encouraged by her stepfather, a former Istanbul Archaeology Museum staff member, Arlette attended Kurt Bittel's lectures on the Hittites at Istanbul University in the early 1950s and joined his 1952 excavations at Fikirtepe, where she met Mellaart. They married in April 1954 at the Cenani family's summer house; their son Alan Kadri was born in 1955.Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at pp. 411f.; idem: Mellaart, James. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, January 2016 [accessed 21 June 2026]; Alan Mellaart: Arlette Mellaart. A Journey to Archaeology. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 103–120.
Mellaart also directed his own fieldwork: a survey of the Jordan Valley, and Kathleen Kenyon's 1952–54 excavations at Jericho, where he dug deeper than authorised during one of her absences to show the tell's base lay lower than assumed.Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at p. 412; idem: Mellaart, James. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, January 2016 [accessed 21 June 2026]. From 1954 to 1959 he worked with Seton Lloyd at Beycesultan, in the upper Menderes basin, recognising it as a major, long-occupied site; in 1956 he found Hacılar, 15 km north of Burdur, which he excavated 1957–60.Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at pp. 412f.; idem: Mellaart, James. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, January 2016 [accessed 21 June 2026]; Maime N. Brami: James Mellaart and Hacılar. In: Emma L. Baysal (ed.): James Mellaart. The Journey to Çatalhöyük, Istanbul 2020, pp. 277–291. Already in this period he produced his first forgeries.Diether Schürr: Mellaarts erste Erfindung. Ein Hieroglyphen-Luwisches Siegel. In: Talanta 50 (2018/19), pp. 83–85; John David Hawkins: The Fantasies of James Mellaart. Fabrications of an Anatolian Archaeologist. In: The IOS Annual 24 (2024), pp. 103–127, at p. 113.
Çatalhöyük and growing scholarly recognition Decisive for Mellaart's later career, however, was not the Bronze Age but a Neolithic site: in November 1958, with David French and Alan Hall, he identified the Neolithic strata of Çatalhöyük in the Konya Plain. Though he had been searching for Bronze Age remains, the discovery redirected his interest to the Neolithisation of Anatolia, challenging the prevailing view that the key Neolithic developments had occurred in the Levant and Fertile Crescent.Eberhard Zangger: James Mellaart's Fantasies. In: Talanta 50 (2018/19), pp. 125–182, at p. 131; Ian Hodder: James Mellaart, 1925–2012. In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy 14 (2015), pp. 411–420, at pp. 413f.