Long before Stonehenge, ancient builders in southeast Türkiye were creating some of the world’s first monumental stone structures. Their most famous site? Göbekli Tepe.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Lee Clare, coordinator of the Göbekli Tepe Research Project, to unravel the mysteries of this 10,000-year-old Neolithic site. Once called the world’s first temple, Göbekli Tepe is far more complex than that - shedding light on early human settlement, ritual, and the transition to farming. With breathtaking and ground breaking archaeology, this is the story of one of the most extraordinary sites of the Stone Age.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What is Göbekli Tepe and why is it significant?
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6,000 years ago, before Stonehenge was built, in southeast Turkey, groups of people were getting together and creating some of the earliest known monumental stone structures from anywhere in the world. Of these, the most famous are at Göbekli Tepe.
The site is home to large round buildings, made of local limestone, full of impressive T-shaped monoliths and sculptures depicting headless humans and animals from the landscape. In the past, Gobekli Tepe has been labelled the first temple. But, as you're about to hear, that's not the case. It's much more complex. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Today we're exploring the fascinating story of Gobekli Tepe, one of the oldest human sedentary settlements ever found. Think of it very loosely as a 10,000-year-old early Neolithic village. And by Neolithic, I mean that period of time after the Ice Age when people started to adopt a settled farming lifestyle.
Gobekli Tepe is quickly becoming one of the most famous early Neolithic settlements from anywhere in the world, and the archaeology is breathtaking. Our guest today is Dr. Lee Clare, an archaeologist who coordinates the Gobekli Tepe Research Project at the German Archaeological Institute.
Lee is one of the leading experts on the archaeology so far uncovered at Gobekli Tepe and what it has so far revealed about the people who lived there 10,000 years ago. It was a pleasure to interview him about the Stone Age mystery that is Gobekli Tepe. Lee, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Well, thank you for having me.
It's my pleasure, because to talk about Gobekli Tepe, I mean, this feels like, Lee, one of the most exciting archaeological projects to be working on in this moment in time. The stuff that is coming out of the ground is extraordinary.
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.
And we'll highlight that, how Göbekli Tepe is almost the name that people think of, but that there's more archaeology beside Göbekli Tepe. But set the scene for us, first of all, Lee. Where in the world are we talking about with Göbekli Tepe?
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Chapter 2: How was Göbekli Tepe discovered and excavated?
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.
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.
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.
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I love that you can get quite accurate dates from just examining that early mortar discovered between those local limestone blocks. You can analyse that building material to get a sense of how long this structure was used for.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What types of structures are found at Göbekli Tepe?
But with these big stone artefacts, I guess these kind of sculpture things, how big are we talking with them, Lee? Are they life-size or bigger than life-size?
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.
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,
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.
And the monolith, so that's kind of like monolith or so one stone, is that what you mean? One piece, yeah, that's right. So is the evidence from Gobekli Tepe, is it the earliest datable evidence we know of for monumentality, for the creation of monuments by humans?
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.
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.
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.
As an archaeologist who's done a lot of work with the media, you know how much we want people to say it is thee or not. But also, I appreciate how that's always a sucker in into something that you don't want to say.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of T-pillars in Göbekli Tepe?
For that reason, we shouldn't actually narrow it down just to this one function by using the word or the term temple.
I mean, packed with this incredible art. Thinking about it with the colour as well, as you highlighted there, Lee, for someone who was walking in and to see all this imagery on the walls and this structure, it really was a statement. I'm really glad we could cover all of that in detail.
I must also, though, ask, keeping on maybe a ritual, but I guess death and burial, which kind of links us away, but takes us away from those main buildings. Do we know anything about burials at Gobekli Tepe or how they treated their dead away from those great buildings?
No. I mean, we always thought that burials would be in the special buildings, you know, at least of some sort of important individuals.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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