Göbekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe is where confident popular writing about prehistory goes wrong, and the phrase doing the damage is "the world's first temple."

Klaus Schmidt, who excavated from 1995 until his death in 2014, proposed a striking model: scattered bands of hunter-gatherers converged on an uninhabited hilltop to raise monumental enclosures under the direction of religious specialists, feasted, and dispersed, and the labour and provisioning this required drove the domestication of cereals. Religion, on this account, produced agriculture rather than following from it. It reversed the standard sequence, it was elegant, and it was reported everywhere.

Excavation since has complicated every element of it. More than seven thousand grinding stones have been recovered, equipment for processing cereal at scale, and not what an empty ceremonial hilltop should yield. Cisterns cut into the bedrock hold over a hundred and fifty cubic metres of rainwater, which is a solution to the problem of living somewhere without a spring. The chipped stone assemblage is, on the excavators' own analysis, indistinguishable from those at sites everyone accepts as settlements. Domestic buildings, hearths and ordinary tools are present. In 2023 the German Archaeological Institute, which runs the excavation, published the conclusion in its own words: the site is best explained as a settlement with a strong ritual component.

The deeper objection had been made earlier, by E. B. Banning in Current Anthropology in 2011. His argument is that the question "is this a temple or a house?" imports a modern separation between sacred and domestic space that the Neolithic Near East does not support. Decorated buildings that people lived in are well attested in the region. A structure can be a dwelling and be charged with meaning, and forcing it into one category or the other tells us about our own categories rather than about theirs. The excavators contested parts of Banning's reading at the time and have since moved a considerable distance toward it. Their own preferred term for the enclosures is a deliberately neutral German one meaning buildings of special purpose.

Several other things commonly said should be handled carefully. The T-shaped pillars are anthropomorphic (some carry arms, hands, belts and loincloths), but who or what they represent is unknown. The deliberate burial of the enclosures is real but its cause is unsettled, and gradual infill is now considered alongside intentional interment. Roughly a tenth of the site has been excavated; geophysical survey shows many more enclosures. And Gobekli Tepe is not unique, Karahan Tepe and other sites in the same region carry comparable architecture, which means it is one instance of a regional tradition rather than a singular event.

Almost everything written about this place for a general readership predates the shift. The honest summary is that it is among the oldest monumental architecture known, that its builders were harvesting wild cereals rather than farming domesticated ones, and that calling it a temple asserts more than anyone can currently demonstrate.

Someone at Gobekli Tepe made a decision archaeologists still argue about: to bury the site's finest carved pillars rather than leave them standing.

Older than farming

Radiocarbon dating places Gobekli Tepe's oldest enclosures at roughly 9600 BCE, meaning the massive T-shaped limestone pillars, some carved with foxes, snakes, scorpions and vultures, were raised by hunter-gatherers before pottery, writing or, on current evidence, settled agriculture existed in the region. That sequence unsettled the older assumption that farming had to come first and monumental building after.

Noticed, then really found

A University of Chicago and Istanbul University survey team recorded the mound in 1963 but judged it an unremarkable medieval cemetery and moved on. The German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, revisiting the survey notes, recognised the significance of the worked flint scattered on the surface and began excavation in 1994, work that continued under his direction until his death in 2014.

Deliberately backfilled

Several of the enclosures show signs of having been intentionally filled in with rubble and debris in antiquity rather than abandoned to natural erosion. Why builders would bury their own monumental work is unresolved; proposed explanations range from ritual closure of a structure considered spent to a change in belief that made continued use unwelcome, but no inscription or comparable site explains the practice directly.