James Mellaart FBA (14 November 1925 – 29 July 2012) was a British and Dutch archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

In 1951 Mellaart began to direct excavations on the sites in Turkey with the assistance of his Turkish-born wife Arlette, who was the secretary of BIAA.

He helped to identify the "champagne-glass" pottery of western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age, which in 1954 led to[citation needed] the discovery of Beycesultan.

When Mellaart excavated the Çatalhöyük site in 1958, his team found more than 150 rooms and buildings, some decorated with murals, plaster reliefs, and sculptures.

The site has since been seen as important as it has helped in the study of the social and cultural dynamics of one of the earliest and largest permanently occupied farming settlements in the Near East.

[citation needed] In 1965 Mellaart gave a report of a new rich find from Dorak to Seton Lloyd of the British Institute.

[8][9] 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.

According to Christoph Bachhuber, current surveys and excavations tend to support many of Mellaart’s observations on changes in material culture at a regional scale.

Another of Mellaart's texts was a Hieroglyphic Luwian inscription named Beyköy 2, which received global headlines when it was announced in 2017 because it purported to contain specific history of the groups known to the Egyptians as Sea Peoples and to the biblical authors as the Philistines.

Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen, who published the text after discovering drawings of it (held to be copies of drawings made by Georges Perrot in 1878 of stone blocks that later disappeared) among Mellaart's papers,[15] have contended for its authenticity,[16][17] but other scholars consider the inscription spurious, pointing out that it fits the pattern of Mellaart's previous forgeries but does not fit what is otherwise known about the history of the period.