There was a time when it was assumed that monumental religious architecture—big, permanent structures—were the products of farming communities. It was estimated that building monumental structures out of stone, mudbricks, or earthen mounds required thousands of hours of labor and such a labor force could only be assembled if there were permanent farming villages with some sort of formal governmental structure. At the site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey archaeologists found megaliths—large stone pillars set upright in a ring structure. There was, however, a small problem as the site did not fit the traditional model: Göbekli Tepe dates to the time just before the development of agriculture and pottery. It was in use from about 11,600 BP to about 10,000 years BP. This is a time when people were engaging in hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants as a way of feeding themselves.
Compared with other sites at this time period and in this region Göbekli Tepe is unusual: it is located on the top of a huge hill which overlooks the surrounding plains. In her book Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings, Jean Manco writes:
“At Gӧblekli Tepe in Turkey the world’s earliest megalithic monument has been uncovered. Remarkably, its first phase dates to around 9000 BC, a period when foragers were turning into farmers. Circles of standing stones are adorned with elaborate animal reliefs. The T-shaped pillars look like stylized human bodies; some are carved with arms and hands.”
In an article in Skeptic, Marc Defant reports:
“The main features of Gӧblekli Tepe are the T-shaped 7- to 10-ton monolithic pillars cut and hauled from crystalline limestone quarries on the tepe (hill) and erected within 10- to 20-meter ring structures made of rocks annealed by clay mortar that encircle the pillars.”
The megaliths—huge stone monuments—which characterize the architecture of Göbekli Tepe stand several meters high and weigh up to ten tons. The largest of these which has been found so far is about 5 meters (a little more than 16 feet) high. At a nearby quarry (the source of the megaliths) there is an unfinished megalith which is nearly 7 meters (23 feet) in length and which weighs an estimated 50 tons.
The pillars were placed to delineate round or oval structures. A single circle might have as many as 12 pillars which were interconnected by stone benches. The central part of each structure is dominated by two pillars which are both larger than those surrounding the structure and of a superior quality.
Using a geomagnetic survey, archaeologists have determined that the site has at least 20 enclosures with more than 200 pillars. Four of these enclosures have been partially excavated by archaeologists.
One of the puzzling things about the site is that the people dumped settlement refuse in the enclosures and sealed them. People seem to have gone to the quarry site, formed and carved the pillars, dragged them to Göbekli Tepe and erected them to form the circular and oval enclosures. Then, sometime after having completed the enclosure, they backfilled it with trash.
Art
The unique characteristics of the site are not only its architecture but also its art. The art found at Göbekli Tepe includes small stone figurines and statues of both men and animals. It also includes large decorated megaliths. In their chapter on symbolism in Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell write:
“The most outstanding feature of the site is the T-Pillars that are occasionally identified as human forms with arms and hands, and they sometimes have wild animals carved on their surfaces. These stone pillar beings are arranged in approximately circular fashion around two of their number, these central beings being distinctly larger than the others.”
Some archaeologists have suggested that the carvings on the megaliths represent stylized humans: with vertical elements showing a pair of arms and hands in low relief and the horizontal and vertical parts representing the head and body. This suggests that these stone pillars were “beings” of some sort. With regard to the stylized anthropomorphic beings, Christopher Seddon, in his book Humans: From the Beginning, writes:
“However, it is unclear as to whether they represent gods, shamans, ancestors, or even demons.”
On the other hand, in their book Thinking Big: How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind, Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar write:
“The pillars represent humans, as shown by the carved hands on their sides.”
Many of the megaliths have carvings which clearly show lions, foxes, gazelles, wild boars, wild asses, aurochs (a type of wild cattle), snakes, birds, insects, and spiders. There are also abstract symbols such as circles, spirals, and H-shaped symbols. On top of the wall, there are sculptures of large animals which seem to be guarding the interior.
There are also a number of abstract symbols which have been interpreted as pictograms (graphic symbols used to convey meaning.) Christopher Seddon writes:
“If the Göblekli Tepe symbols were indeed pictograms, then the origins of writing may extend back into the early Neolithic, thousands of years before the appearance of writing systems such as cuneiform and hieroglyphic script.”
There are no female sculptures that have been found at the site and the symbolism in the Göbekli Tepe art appears to be male-oriented. Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell write:
“These T-pillars, as well as representing or being human forms, may themselves be evocations of the phallus with an elongated shaft and a pronounced head.”
Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell also write:
“One of the most surprising and distinctive aspects of the Gӧblekli data is the lack of female symbolism.”
Who Built the Site and Why
Traditionally, sites with monumental architecture such as that found at Göblekli Tepe would have been built by sedentary farmers raising both domesticated plants and animals. However, none of the plant and animal remains analyzed by archaeologists are domesticates. The animal remains include only wild species: gazelle, wild cattle, wild ass, red deer, wild pig, fox, wolf, leopard, and several species of birds. This seems to indicate that the people who constructed this monument were hunters and gatherers.
It is clear that the construction of Göbekli Tepe required a great deal of labor expended over many decades. Several hundred people must have gathered for a period of several months to construct one of the enclosures. Where did the people live? Where did they come from? How were they fed while constructing the enclosures? Why did they build these structures? In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Harari writes:
“The only way to build Gӧblekli Tepe was for thousands of foragers belonging to different bands and tribes to cooperate over an extended period of time. Only a sophisticated religious or ideological system could sustain such efforts.”
So far, archaeologists have found no evidence that people actually lived at Göbekli Tepe. It appears to have been a purely ceremonial site, perhaps a place of refuge or pilgrimage. One of the archaeologists who worked at the site, Klaus Schmidt, in his chapter in Discovery! Unearthing the New Treasures of Archaeology, has suggested that Göbekli Tepe is a burial site. He writes:
“Funeral customs could account for the enormous amount of work undertaken for just one enclosure. We haven’t found the burials, but we expect they will be located beneath the benches or behind the walls.”
People may have come to Göbekli Tepe from other villages, such as Nevali Çori, to build the enclosures. Nevali Çori is a residential village that also contained T-shaped megalithic pillars and limestone sculptures of humans and animals. The symbolic language at the two sites is similar.
Christopher Seddon mentions a number of possibilities for this religious site:
“One possibility is that the animals depicted in the various enclosures are totemic. It could be that the site was frequented by a number of groups, each of which identified itself with a different animal or animals and travelled to the site to perform rituals in its own particular enclosure. Another possibility is that like the painted caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe, Göbekli Tepe was associated with shamanistic practices.”
Some scholars have suggested that Göbekli Tepe served as a location for religious ceremonies and altered states of consciousness. They suggest that the animal carvings may have been related to myths.
In many cultures the value of art is in its creation rather than in the viewing of it. In her chapter in he Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, Karina Croucher writes:
“Many of the reliefs, which would have taken considerable time to carve, were partially obscured or built over, suggesting that their creation was more significant than purely long-term viewing.”
When I was a graduate student in archaeology more than half a century ago, the basic hypothesis was that large megalithic sites were made possible because of food surpluses generated by agriculture. Göbekli Tepe does not support this hypothesis. In his chapter in Discovery! Unearthing the New Treasures of Archaeology, Klaus Schmidt writes:
“My conjecture is that construction at Göbekli Tepe was accompanied by efforts to develop innovations to provide subsistence for the workmen occupied in the quarries and in building.”
There is also an assumption that the construction of monumental sites, such as Göbekli Tepe, requires social organization with some type of formal leadership. Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, and Robin Dunbar write:
“Were the monuments of Göbekli Tepe possible without a leader to organize the work? This would have been someone to direct the design, quarrying, carving and erection, not to mention the labour of backfilling the site.”
Radiocarbon dating shows that building at this site was underway by 9130 BCE. While agriculture had already started in the Levantine corridor by this time, agriculture would not be widely practiced in Turkey until about 8500 BCE. Comparing Göbekli Tepe with other large megalithic sites around the world: Newgrange in Ireland dates to 3370 BCE; Egypt’s first pyramid dates to about 2667 BCE; and Stonehenge in England dates to about 2200 BCE.
In other words, changes in the social systems and belief systems may actually come before changes in economic systems and may, in fact, be one of the driving forces behind such changes.
More Human Origins
Human Origins: Making Spoken Language Possible
Human Origins: The human face
Human Origins: Eyes
Human Origins: Transitional Humans
Human Origins: Ancient urbanization
Human Origins: Fossil Evidence
Human Origins: How children learn language
Human Origins: Sexual Dimorphism