The Neolithic produced the earliest large religious architecture anywhere, and it did so before writing, before metal and in several cases before farming was fully established. Gobekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia has enclosures of massive carved T shaped pillars raised by people who were still substantially hunting and gathering, which reverses the older assumption that surplus agriculture had to come first and monuments afterwards.
E. B. Banning has challenged part of the standard reading, arguing that the enclosures may have been roofed buildings used by households rather than temples in any exclusive sense, and the dispute is instructive because it turns on how a religious building is recognised at all when no text says so. Elsewhere the forms differ.
The passage tombs of Ireland and Orkney align on particular sunrises or sunsets, the stone circles of Britain and Brittany define enclosed spaces without roofs, and the temples of Malta are built to a repeated plan with carved altars and figures. Heart of Neolithic Orkney, inscribed by UNESCO in 1999, groups a settlement, a chambered tomb and two stone circles precisely because the religious and the domestic cannot be separated there.