The interest of the excavation staff at Çatalhüyük was caught by the ingenious door latches used in the village of Küçükköy, 50 km. S.E. of Konya. The houses in the village show many traditional features, some of which, such as the wall decorations, may even survive from the Neolithic period; many houses have Seljuk style stalactites on cut-away corners. Generally each property consists of a courtyard surrounded by a wall, containing one or more houses and other buildings.

There are two types of door latch, one for courtyard doors and one for house doors, and both are sufficiently interesting to be worth recording. (They work considerably better than the modern Turkish iron latches.) In a village with such traditional houses it is impossible to guess at what date such door latches might have come into use. They would have been suitable for any house with a properly hung door.