Dr. Lee Clare
Appearances
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
For example, if we're looking at building D, which is one of the most impressive of the preserved or the most impressive of the buildings that we can see there today, the central pillars are about five and a half metres in height. So really quite, once I next look up, it's quite an impressive thing to see. Of course, they're carved with various depictions in low relief. Also, we have high reliefs.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And of course, on top of this structure would have been a roof. We know they were roofed over. I think perhaps really the most intriguing of our new results is that these buildings were occupied or were in use for a very long period of time. We're talking hundreds of years, in fact. We have radiocarbon data. from the mud mortar from the walls.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And we can see different building phases within that structure. And that tallies them with the radiocarbon dates. So we can say that the earliest phases of these buildings were like PPNA in date, so sort of end of the 10th millennium BC. And they actually continued into the early PPNB to about mid 9th millennium.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So we're looking at sort of, you know, a few hundred years, and these buildings were constantly being used were being you know reshaped and lots of recycling going on they were moving tea pillars around they were sort of erasing carvings and doing new carvings so very much they were never sort of built to one plan and then sort of completed but it was a constantly changing structure.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
That's the only way of doing it. We have no other way of doing it at the present. Of course, we have the lithic finds from various contexts associated with the buildings, but of course, they just give a general date. But the radiocarbon data, that's really special because especially the data coming from the mortar between the walls, of course, there's no guarantee that it's exact.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We can't take them at face value because, of course, you've always got to think about the old wood effect, dating old parts of a tree instead of the younger bits of the tree and that sort of thing.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But we're actually seeing enough data now to see that we do have this clear pattern that corresponds and coincides, or correlates rather, with the building phases that we can see in the building archaeology. So we can actually see that we do have a long duration that these buildings were in use, a long use life, as we say.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
No, I think the local limestone, I mean, it's a limestone plateau where these buildings are actually constructed upon. And in actual fact, a few of the buildings of these special buildings are actually constructed directly on the limestone plateau. And the limestone plateau is the floor of the buildings. And that plateau has been painstakingly smoothed.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So it's very possible that they're quarrying the tea plants from the spot where they were probably more or less erected and put upright. And then the floor was then smoothed and, you know, Bob's your uncle. There's your floor. And it's very high quality, obviously. Other buildings have plaster floors, which are imitating then these, probably these natural limestone floors.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So, you know, these guys knew what they were doing. It was a very...
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
advanced technology i mean they we can't actually imagine them as being often people say ah you know cavemen no you know they were like us they were physically like us cognitively cognitively perhaps a little you know different but if we'd grown up in that period then we'd have been just like them and if they'd grown up today been born today i'm sure they'd been sort of you know on their mobiles looking at instagram you know
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, okay. I mean, if we're talking about the T-pillars, I mean, the tallest, as I said, are the central ones in these special buildings, and they can be up to six metres, five and a half metres, six metres tall. And those in the enclosing wall, about three metres, three and a half metres. They're larger than us, larger than human. That's why we speak about monumentality.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But of course, monumentality is also relative. For us, they're not really monumental for our understanding. If we stand in a city and there's a skyscraper that's dozens of stories high, that's more monumental for us. Five, six meters high is not really monumental. But for them,
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
living in an environment where we didn't have any of that sort of metropolis or what we have today, five and a half meter, six meter high monoliths would have been very much monumental.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Like I said, it's a perspective thing. I mean, for a hunter-gatherer, Even if they'd put up a thousand years before that, if they'd put up a three-meter-high wooden whatever, that would have been for them, I think, monumental. But yeah, I mean, strictly speaking, for example, our UNESCO application, we're a UNESCO site since 2018. And of course, that's about monumentality.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And for us, of course, the fact that it's carved, it's preserved, it's in stone, the fact that it's so durable, that for us is also monumental. And so for that reason, I would say it's one of the earliest monumental sites. Of course, there are now sister sites in the region, which are equally as old or the same age. So it's not just Gobekli Tepe.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But yeah, so we could say fair, it would be fair enough to say it's one of the earliest monumental buildings, monumental structures that we know so far.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I don't like working with superlatives. I just hate it.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, for example, Kaharun Tepe is one, Gobekli Tepe is the other, and there's another site called Ayanla which hasn't been excavated yet. But I think it's due to be excavated at some point pretty soon. And those are like three, we could call them sort of central places or central sites within this network of Tepela sites down there. And there are smaller sites as well.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And names like Navalichori would be there, Saiborj, Sefertepech. We have a dozen sites we now know down there in the region. But these three sites, Ayanla, Gobekli Tepe, Karan Tepe, those are the big central sites. They're the bigger sites which have this very long duration from the beginning of the early Holocene, mid-10th millennium BC, to the PPNB, end of the 9th millennium BC.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
There will definitely be interaction. I mean, we have the symbolism. I mean, there are differences. There's lots of similarities, but there are sort of nuances and differences between, for example, in the symbolism whereby at Göbekli Tepe you have more animals depicted. At Karahan Tepe, there's more of a focus on the human form.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We're just starting to see that because the excavations at these other sites at Karahan, for example, only started back in 2019. So it's really, that's just coming out now. And we're seeing, you know, the first sort of making the first comparisons with our material. So that's something, you know, that we need to watch out for in the future. A network was there, economic, cultural, social.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Well, it's been quite special for quite a number of years now. And of course, in the meantime, there are other sites as well that are coming out at the same age with similar material culture. So the area itself, the region, is very exciting.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah. Of course, you do get smaller figurines and that sort of thing, but the majority that we know of is actually applied or carved into or from the pillars. You have low reliefs, which are a couple of centimetres protruding from the pillar. You have high reliefs, like statues are actually carved from the pillar itself, but still attached to the pillar. It's 3D, yeah? Yeah, 3D.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Funnily enough, I mentioned earlier that the gazelle was the most important animal for the hunters, for the meat supply. But there's only one or two of those actually depicted on the art. They prefer like, you know, the leopards, the auroch, the wild boar.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
In fact, just a couple of years ago, we had a wonderful new discovery of a life-size wild boar carved from limestone in Building D to set at a focal point of the building. You know, so it's these... I say sort of dangerous animals, also lots of insects, snakes, scorpions. So they're sort of a bit sort of, and this has all been interpreted in various ways in the past.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But for example, Klaus Schmidt, the previous excavator, associated it with like death myths and death rituals and others with fear. So there's lots of different ways of doing this. But of course, you know, the fact is that they're concentrating on these animals that had some sort of power or which were obviously important for their narratives where, you know, stories were attached to them.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And of course, they're choosing these leopards are great, you know, and wild boars. I love them.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
No. I mean, I think the wild animals themselves are attached to stories because, of course, you know, they could say, okay, I just went out and I saw a wild boar and I'm going to sort of put it on my pillow now. But no, they come in different constellations. And I think we're actually seeing here narratives, and that's the most important thing.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And this is why, in my opinion, Gobekli Tepe is so important. It's not just the monumentality, but it's actually the fact that we're seeing here narratives which are previously oral narratives. narratives told by storytellers around the campfire, which for the first time are being petrified. They're being carved into stone and they're preserved for us today.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I think these narratives are very much telling us the traditions and the stories of the foundation myths of hunter-gatherer populations dating before the Neolithic, before this whole process took off. In that respect, they're so valuable.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I think that's the reason why the site really deserves its UNESCO status, because it does say it's so important for humanity, the fact that we have these narratives still preserved.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
That's right. I mean, it's a soft material compared to other stone. There is harder stone. I mean, not far from the site, we also have a source of basalt, which is being used for grinding stones for the wild. Wheat, for example, also for minerals, because of course, what I didn't mention just now is the fact we found colour
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
remains of colour on the statue of the wild boar that I mentioned from two years ago, its mouth was still red. So they were using sort of a red pigment, which had probably been sort of grinding up and, you know, and applying to the statues, but also to the pillars.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So it wouldn't have been as grey as we see it today on the pictures, on the photographs, but it would have been a much brighter affair with much more colour, especially red colour.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Okay, we're talking about southeastern Turkey. I mean, if you grab your map and Google Turkey, Şanlıurfa, you'll find the city in the southeastern part of Turkey. It's in the Upper Euphrates Basin, so it's between the Euphrates River and the Tigris River, two very important rivers, of course, in prehistory. Also in a region commonly referred to as Upper Mesopotamia.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
The thing is, of course, you say there are less human depictions, but the T pillars themselves are depictions of the human form. Oh, okay. The actual shaft of the pillar is the body, and the T at the top is in the head. We know that because we have in Building D the two central pillars in the centre of that building. They have actually carved arms in low relief. They have a belt.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
They have a loincloth, all carved in low relief. They have necklaces, but the face isn't depicted. They didn't want to depict the face, but they didn't need to depict the face. They chose not to. But they're very clearly, the T-form is a depiction of the human form, albeit very sort of abstract.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
On the other hand, we know they could carve faces because we have small figurines and larger statues, fragments that show the human form. It's quite interesting. The faces are sometimes, they remind me of the old Norman helmets, 1066 and all that. They've got this sort of nose piece and the eyebrows are very, very clearly formed.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
The heads are sometimes found quite often separate from the bodies, but I think that's because the neck is always a weak part of the statue and they're probably broke. It could be that they broke them before deposition As part of a ritual, that's also possible. But the bodies, in fact, they also have, they're shown with arms in different sort of gestures.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And on a lot of occasions, especially on the larger statues, we see the hands actually framing the genitals. And so phalli, the phallus is very important to this community. There are lots of penises at Gobekli Tepe.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, exactly that. Lots of different purposes. I mean, you mentioned all of those that we just mentioned, but also like, you've got to remember these people are going for a very important, crucial transition at this time. Okay. I mean, when you're a hunter-gatherer, you're more mobile, your groups are smaller. And when you start settling down, your group size increases.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So all of a sudden, you know, you're having more children and Are the groups growing in size? You have more demands on the resources in the landscape. You have perhaps increasing territoriality because of the sedentism, because of the growing population. Whose hunting ground is that? Does it belong to this site or that site?
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
You have like first conflicts coming up perhaps because of surplus accumulation. People are sort of you know, accumulating wealth, or at least materials. And of course, that leads to conflict, as it always does. So you have these buildings are perhaps places of conflict mitigation, where people are coming together to mitigate those problems.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I mean, we have no evidence for the conflict at this time, no evidence for warfare, strangely enough. And so perhaps that's due to these wonderful buildings bringing people together and mitigating those conflict situations. Just one interpretation, if you're a pacifist. These buildings, they're multifunctional.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So we're in a very key region for Neolithicization. So the first sort of introduction of farming, settled communities, I mean, it's where it all took off. It's one of those core regions of Neolithicization in the world.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
For that reason, we shouldn't actually narrow it down just to this one function by using the word or the term temple.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
No. I mean, we always thought that burials would be in the special buildings, you know, at least of some sort of important individuals.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But of course, you know, with the changes taking place in this sort of population at that time, you know, an increasing number of people, you'd expect some sort of incipient hierarchization because, of course, you know, these societies or hunter-gatherer societies are well known to be sort of quite egalitarian, although egalitarian doesn't really exist, you know, strictly speaking.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But we haven't found any burials in the special buildings so far. I say so far, you know, there's always, you know, it can always happen. What we do have is quite characteristic for the region itself and for the time, so for the pre-Potterian mythic period in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean, which is subfloor burial.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We have two burials so far at Gobekli Tepe, and all of them from domestic contexts, because of course that's something also that's quite important for Gobekli Tepe, that we've now realised it's not just a ritual site, because there was discussions previously, oh, it's just people coming there regular part-times in the year to celebrate and to build these temples.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But of course, now we know it's a settlement. We have the domestic context. We have the houses. Beneath the house floors, you frequently get burials in this period. When grandma died, you actually went down into your cellar or to the ground floor of your building, opened up a hole and bunged her in, covered her up. Really, the living and the dead were very in close proximity
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
They weren't separating them by putting them to a separate burial ground away from the site, but they were keeping them close to them. So you get a lot of burials beneath the floors of the buildings, at the thresholds of the buildings, and close within that sort of activity zones of the domestic areas. And we have two such burials at Göbekli Tepe.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We have one which is, I think, a teenage or in her early 20s, a female individual in a hocker position, so sort of crouched and laying as if sleeping. And one in another domestic building where we have, I think, three or four individuals possibly, but not well preserved because actually in prehistory they'd gone in and disturbed the burial because that's something that they also did.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
with particular individuals who don't know what the criteria were, but they went back to the burial after a little while and they exhumed the skull or parts of the body. We also have, with regard to the skull and the so-called skull cult at Gobekli Tepe, which is also quite well known from the East Mediterranean at this time, skulls were exhumed and plastered in the shape with the features.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We don't have any plastered skulls at Gobekli Tepe, but we do have fragments of skull with sort of carving and grooves and scratch marks. So actually they didn't wait too long for the skin and the hair to sort of decay. They went in quite quickly afterwards, got out the skull, scraped it clean, and then put some grooves in to hold like a cord
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
and decorated them and there are also sort of drill holes in them that they're perhaps using to suspend them and to hang them you know you see it sometimes in ethnographical examples you know that they have mummies of dead people they bring out at certain times of the year for certain festivals that could be similar here they could have like the skulls coming out of
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
certain times of the year being hung up in a special building. The ancestors were so important. They didn't have history books or books to hold onto that knowledge. They probably knew that the knowledge was in the brain, in the skull. That was the seat of the spirit. Of course, the ancestors were the all-knowing. They did that, I think, to celebrate the ancestors.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Ancestor veneration, animism was at the centre of the rituals and the belief systems at this time.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Okay, at Quebec-les-Tepes, you wouldn't see the Euphrates, in fact, from the site. We are quite a number of kilometres to the east of the Euphrates river, and also to the west of the Tigris. So we're sort of in between, more towards the Euphrates, but between the two, rivers and it's a hilly region. We're overlooking the Haran Plain to the south.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, it's funny you say that because there are a couple of sites. I mean, excavated quite a few years ago now at Chayenu, I mentioned it earlier. It's one of the earliest sites that was discovered in the 1960s and actually excavation started shortly after the survey work. And that's located further to the east of Gobekli Tepe in the Diyarbakir region.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
There they found the so-called skull building, and they have actually a building, a ritual structure, they say, and within that there was a room full of human skulls.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We don't know who those individuals were, but interestingly, just recently in the frame of the new investigations in the Orpha region at a site called Sephetepa, there was also a small room in a building discovered which also contained numerous skulls. So the burial traditions were varied. perhaps depending on who you were, your status, your age, your place in society.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
That's how you mean there was a skull card, but also there was the inhumations, but also this skull collection point, as it were, in some of the buildings. Skull collection point. Well, there you go. Sorry, it's a bit of a strange term to use.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah. I mean, as I said, we now know that the site was not a purely ritual site as previously sort of posited, but in fact, it was a settlement from the offset.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So in fact, we've got a couple of new, I say new, back in 2017-18, we had two new permanent canopies constructed over the site to protect the archaeology from the elements, because of course, the weather down there is pretty harsh, especially in the summer, it's very hot.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
and the sun etc but to construct these canopies we had to sort of remove sondages where the legs of these things were going to be anchored into the plateau so we had to go through all the I couldn't drill for the archaeology we had to remove it first so we went through little sondages in several places right down to the base of the mound and found sort of
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We had little keyholes into the early settlement phases because, of course, at the bottom of the mound, that's the oldest sort of accumulations. And the higher you get, the younger it gets. And we actually found evidence of domesticated – or domestic structures, rather – dwellings in these oldest layers, which are very small, sort of round structures –
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We're about 400 or 500 metres above the Haran Plain, so about 770 metres above sea level. The foothills of the Eastern Taurus Mountains come through southern Turkey. Actually, from the site itself, when you look northwards, I was actually there just last week, it's been snowing in the mountains there.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
They had no T-pillars, but they were also multi-phase, had several floors used. You could see the walking horizons in their activity zones with hearths and evidence of people chipping and doing napping and producing beads from stone and bird bones, that sort of thing.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah. So very, very domestic. And that increases over time. And in fact, by the height of the site in the mid-9th millennium BC, you've got rectangular structures, domestic structures.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So in fact, it's quite interesting because over the course of time, that's quite an important thing in the PP&A in this sort of period from 9,600 to 8,700, buildings, whether domestic or special, were usually round oval. And then at the onset of the PP&B, about 8,700 BC, they invent or corner appears and they start building rectangular buildings.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Of course, they don't actually stop building round or oval, but the rectangular comes in and it sort of increases over time as well. That's one way of data. That's one of the differences between the PPNA and the PPNB, the shape of the buildings. So, yeah, I mean, at the time of the PPNB, I think, we were looking at very much a flourishing settlement, very much a village or perhaps even bigger.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
In fact, we have to be very careful because we can't actually date this very well. I mean, we don't know whether The site's very big and the different areas are not connected, so we can't actually compare the stratigraphy. We don't have radiocarbon dates enough with high resolution enough to say, okay, they're contemporaneous. It could well be they're moving around the actual site itself.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
First of all, we're in the northwestern part of the site. It all gets a bit nasty and dirty, they've been there too long, throwing out their rubbish, that sort of thing. They move to the eastern side. They do that for a decade or so. Oh, it's getting a bit nasty. Or they split into two groups. That's the way this mound then develops over the 1,500 years of occupation of the site.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
The dating is still... Bit difficult, but if the site, the entire nine, nine and a half hectare site was all being used or was settled at the same time in the PPNB, then we're looking at a major settlement with perhaps even a couple of hundred or more people.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah. I mean, the rubbish dumps, we'll say the rubbish pits are very much, you know, important for us. We just want everyone's rubbish. But of course, we get a good insight into the animals being hunted. Like I said, the gazelle was very important. We have the horn cores, and we can see actually which parts of the animal are being transported to the site from the hunting grounds.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
From the Göbekli Tepe site, you can actually look northwards towards the Eastern Taurus and see the snow-covered peaks. You can actually see Nemrudda, which is another UNESCO World Heritage Site there in the region, a bit younger than Göbekli Tepe, obviously. But it's like a tourist foothill sort of region looking down onto the plain of Haran, which then extends southwards into northern Syria.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
In fact, interestingly, we have hunting traps in the vicinity of Gobekli Tepe, the so-called kites or desert kites, known from Jordan, for example. We have them also in Gobekli Tepe and in the Atash Tepe region.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So actually we're looking at sort of organized hunting, industrial hunting in a way, in that they were driving these animals or these herds of animals into corrals and then sort of, you know, hunting large numbers of the animals at the same time. You know, that's the only way of then actually sort of feeding your larger population perhaps at that time.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And water resources, I'm drifting tangents now. That's okay, that's okay. But of course, water supply was crucial. I mean, it was always thought Gobekli Tepe had no water supply. People were walking to a water source, perhaps kilometers away from the site and coming back. But we don't know whether there was, perhaps there was a spring at the site that's no longer active.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But in the meantime, we do have very good evidence for systems. And they're actually, if you remember, Or as I said, the climate conditions, they were improving after the last ice age at the time of occupation. And rainfall was even greater than today. And perhaps we're even looking at summer rainfall as well.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And they were harvesting that rainwater in large cisterns and collecting it via channels into these large pits and that being used at the site as a source of water flow for the population.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, that's right. I mean, we haven't got the latrines yet. I'd like to find a toilet.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, we've got the whole repertoire, you know, very characteristic of a settlement. In fact, I mean, that's also a very good indication that it was a settlement and not just a ritual focal point because, of course, the amount of lithics coming from Gobekli Tepe I mean, it's just enormous. We have boxes and boxes and boxes full at the museum and the excavation house, and every year it increases.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Of course, this is made from local materials, so the flint is also quite local. We don't quite know exactly where the sources were, but there were sources nearby. We know that. The assemblage, everything from arrowheads to scrapers to drills, that sort of thing, It's all there, and for that reason, we know it was a settlement scenario.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Apart from that, of course, for the carving of the T-pillars, we don't actually have a workshop where we could actually say it was – we have negatives in the plateau where these large blocks were taken from. But we don't have any tools that have been sort of left lying around there. We haven't actually found anything like that.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But of course, there are very chunky bits of stuff that were obviously being used for bashing, but they could have been used for that function as well. It's the kind of hammerstones kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not being, my terminology is very, is lacking at the moment. I'm just trying to make it more sort of, you know, visual for you. But yeah, so that was going on.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, and of course, I mentioned the basalt, which was not far away, used for the grinding tools there. Of course, you had imports of obsidian, very small amounts of obsidian coming in, less than 1%, and that's coming from different sources from Eastern Anatolia. That also testifies to some sort of down-the-line contact with groups living further to the north in the more mountainous regions.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We have very little evidence for what was going on at Gobekli Tepe after around the end of the 9th millennium BC, so 8,000 BC, it all starts to disappear. Of course, that's a time that we get more and more sites with domesticated species of animals, goats, sheep, that sort of thing, and your crops. It's going from wild wheat to domesticated wheat. That's right. I think that plays a part.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
The fact that people are now turning away from these hunter-gatherer traditions to these farming traditions with regard to their subsistence. Of course, the changes in subsistence go hand-in-hand with changes in society, perhaps changes in belief systems. Of course, after Gobekli Tepe, these big enclosures or these big special buildings, they also disappear. We don't have anything comparable
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
until the late Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age in prehistory. So that's quite remarkable. I think the reason is that it was actually the farming, of course, the location of Gobekli Tepe at the moment, or even then at the time, is very hilly, very rocky, and it's not very good for farming.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And of course, you go down a few kilometres into the plain, into the Haram plain to the south, the conditions are a lot better. You can have your fields, you can have your crops growing, you can have your animals and everything. That's one reason. I think also that the belief systems and the social structures change as well along with that.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And I think, you know, recently I proposed that there was, we don't have any good evidence for sort of social hierarchies or the elites at this time in the pre-pottery Neolithic. I think it was very much to do with the fact that they didn't really exist.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We're looking at inspired individuals, charismatic individuals, which were playing that role, perhaps gifted storytellers or, I don't know, shamans, that sort of thing, taking on that role. Of course, they were no longer needed. It changed. People came away from that.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Of course, when subsistence changed, belief system changed, social structures changed, the site was no longer needed in that respect.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Oh, we've got a lot of work left to do. I mean, the excavations, you know, we've been criticized for saying that it's going to take generations of archaeologists to actually complete work at Gobekli Tepe. In fact, there's no need to actually excavate the whole site.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
It's always like we have to save something for the next generations coming along of archaeologists, you know, with better methodologies. So it's really a question of preserving what we're excavating, what we have excavated previously, and making that really sort of visible and available to the public and anyone interested. So yeah, that's our task at hand.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And it's going to keep us busy at least to the end of my working life. And I've got quite a few years left yet.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Well, thanks again for having me, Tristan. It's been great fun.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Okay, I mean, Gobekli Tepe itself doesn't date back to the very sort of, you know, neotization is something that happened over a very long period of time. You know, it didn't actually start in the early Holocene.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
The sort of components of that package, neolithic package, we often talk about different sort of components in that package, like being settled, like sedentism, or domestication of animals, secondary products like milk and sheep and animal traction.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
It's all part of that neotization sort of story, whereby the earliest sort of signs of that sedentism are much earlier than Gobekli Tepe, and they appear in the Levant in the late Paleolithic, in the late Pleistocene. So, you know, we're talking about 15,000, 20,000 years before, present, in fact. So that's the Ice Age, that's still the Ice Age. The late Ice Age, yeah. Right, right.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But of course, Gobekli Tepe comes in about 9,600, 9,500 BC. So at the beginning of the early Holocene, which is a climate amelioration following the end of the Younger Dryas. So the Younger Dryas are the cold, dry phase at the end of the last ice age. And this early Holocene period, of course, that's when things really sort of
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
become much more lush in this area, and you get the first settled communities coming in. And Göbekli Tepe is one of the first, I say one of the first, not the first, there are earlier settled communities in the region, but one of the first settled communities appearing in southeastern parts of Türkiye.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
That's right. Interestingly, from the period before Beklitepe, this sort of epipaleolithic in the late Pleistocene, like in the Younger Dryas, we have very little evidence of human activity in fact. Further to the east in the Tigris region, we have a few sites where we do have like a continuous occupation from the Younger Dryas.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
We already have a settlement actually into the early Holocene and that's sort of continuous whereby with us in Shandong, at the moment, we don't have a site where we have that continuous occupation from the Ice Age into the early Holocene. But yeah, the whole region We have to expect that there were people, there was activity going on there. We just haven't actually found it yet.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And I think it's just a question of time with the more intense investigations going on down in the region now in Shannon Wolf. I think we will find the predecessors of Gobekli Tepe.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
There is one site that's quite early that's within the frame of the Tashtepela project, looking at these sites in the region, the Neolithic sites, which is PP&A in date, which is like, you know, early 10th millennium or mid 10th millennium, sorry. But as I say, the majority of sites down there, we're looking at like sort of late 10th and 9th millennium BC.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Okay. I mean, PPN is the abbreviation for pre-pottery Neolithic.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Which means, obviously, as I said earlier, we have this sort of Neolithic process going on. And pottery, the production of pottery is one of the things that comes in during the Neolithicization. And at this point in time, we have sedentary populations. We have other things going on like, I don't know, cultivation of wild cereal, but we don't yet have pottery.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So it's getting there gradually, but we don't have pottery yet. That's where we term it pre-pottery Neolithic. And the pre-Pottery Neolithic is then split up into different blocks, into an A block, into a B block. And the B also is separated, or we distinguish between an early PPNB, a middle PPNB, and a late PPNB.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So to give you a rough sort of chronology for that, we said the PPNA starts roughly about 9,500 BC, so at the beginning of the early Holocene, the climate amelioration, and goes about 8,700. At 8,700, we've got the PPNB coming in with the early PPNB. which goes about 8,200 and the middle PPMB starts, et cetera, et cetera.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So, you know, we're looking really at the early, the PPNA is the earliest sort of manifestation of this pre-pottery Neolithic in the region.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I don't think there are any major changes in the topography. I think that came a bit later with farming. Then you have the erosion, the alluviation, and that's something that came in a bit later. Regarding the environment, I mean, obviously, any region that's settled by human beings, they can use it. We're very adaptive. We can adapt to most things.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Of course, Gobekli Tepe was very attractive, I think. The region was very attractive at the time in the early Holocene. We don't have a great deal of paleoclimate proxies from the region. We rely quite heavily on the archaeobotanics and the archaeozoology that we're getting from the excavated sites, so the animal bones and the preserved pollen or remains of certain plants.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But we do know that it was a lot different to today's environment or to today's landscape. Because of course, today is very much a cultural landscape, farming going on, there's irrigation, there's no trees left in the plateau, it's on the plain to the south. It's all very much a cultural landscape, as I said.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But in the early Holocene, so at the time of Gobekli Tepe, it would have been a lot different. It would have been a sort of an open woodland with oak and wild almond. There would have been lots of grasses. Of course, your wild wheats would have been there as well. You would have had herds of gazelle. Gazelle was the most important animal for the hunters at that time.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
In the wetter areas, you would have had wild boar. You would have had auroch. You would have had all of these animals running around. It would have been a very attractive place for hunters and gatherers. But at the same time, as I say, I mean, you get that all around the world.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And of course, the question as to why sedentism and why neolithicization started here is a major topic that I think we would all love to answer the question why that was. But yeah, that's what it would have looked like 10,000, 11,000 years ago in this region.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Okay, the site was first discovered in the 1960s, in fact. It was a survey operation looking for Neolithic sites, and that was conducted by Halit Canberra, who was a professor at the University of Istanbul in And also with colleagues from the United States, from Chicago, in fact.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And they were doing a series of surveys in southeastern parts of Turkey and also in all that region down there, looking for first indications of the Neolithic in this region. Because, of course, they had already found stuff in adjacent parts.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And for a long time, it was thought that Turkey was the modern sort of Anatolian Peninsula, was avoided by the Neolithic because they thought people going around it was too harsh. The climate was too bad. But of course, around this time, they were finding more and more evidence for neurotic activity in Anatolia.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
For example, Çatalhöyük would be a site that was discovered at this time as well, the work of Mellat there and Hajula. But of course, in the southeastern part of the country, we have then sites like Çayönü, which were discovered in the course of this survey. But also Göbekli Tepe was discovered during their survey work, but was never excavated at the time.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I mean, it wasn't actually excavated until the mid-1990s.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah. I mean, apart from the COVID year, we've been there, not me personally. Of course, the work at the site is very strongly connected to German research or to German researchers. Harald Hauptmann, who was actually the head of the institution where I work now, he was Excavation director was doing the work down there with the channel of a museum.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
And he was then followed by his student, Klaus Schmidt, who is really well known for his excavations at Gobekli Tepe. He was always involved in the field work and then as excavation director in his own right after Hauptmann retired. And he was there until 2014 when he sadly passed away. And then I came in and I happened to be there and, you know, the rest is history, as you say.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But yeah, I mean, the site has been now under excavation for about 30 years.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
Yeah, very good. Because of course, I'm not too keen on that word. Of course, it's actually, you know, in the media, you know, advertisements and everything. It's like, come and visit the world's first temples. I'm not too happy with that terminology for various reasons. But of course, I think, you know, I prefer a more neutral term.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
I refer to these structures as special buildings because they are special and they're buildings for that very simple reason. And regarding their function, I think, of course, they were probably ritual centres. There were rituals taking place in these structures.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
But at the same time, they're also being used for, you know, people are identifying themselves or the groups, you know, were identifying themselves with these structures. They hold narratives. If you look at the pillars that are in these buildings, all of these carvings, those are narratives, those are stories that meant something to these people.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So a lot more to do with identity, with community, with coming together. I think temple would be a too narrow definition. Apart from that, of course, the term temple is very often associated with modern connotations of what religion is or religion. Of course, that's something we need to get away from because we're 12,000 years ago.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
So far, we have eight excavated or partially excavated special buildings. A to H, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, S, H. That's correct. We have eight partially excavated special buildings. Now, the majority of these are actually sort of round oval in shape, in floor plan, as it were, with diameters of 10 to 20 meters, depending on where you're looking, which building it is. And they are buildings.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
They were roofed over. And they have walls. And frequently, it's said that they're dry stone walls. They're not dry stone walls. They actually have mortar in between, so like a mud mortar. And at regular intervals in the wall, you have sort of T-pillars, so monoliths, T-shaped, carved mainly or mostly in one piece from the natural limestone in the area of the site.
The Ancients
Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?
As I said, regular intervals, sometimes 10, 11, 12 in the circle within the walls. And in the centre of, or near to the centre of the building, we have two upright T-pillars, which are larger.