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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.
Göbekli 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 Göbekli Tepe Research Project at the German Archaeological Institute. Lee is one of the leading experts on the archaeology so far uncovered at Göbekli Tepe and what it has so far revealed about the people It was a pleasure to interview him about the Stone Age mystery.
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 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 Gobekli Tepe is almost the name that people think of, but that there's more archaeology beside Gobekli Tepe. But set the scene for us first of all, Lee. Where in the world are we talking about with Gobekli Tepe?
Okay, we're talking about southeastern Turkey. I mean, if you grab your map and Google Shenmue, 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. So we're in a very key region for neolithisation. So the first sort of introduction of farming, settled communities, it's where it all took off. It's one of those core regions of neolithisation in the world. So is it on the cusp of the Fertile Crescent that is popular today? Yeah.
And with the topography of Göbekli Tepe today, should we be imagining, I mean, can you see the Euphrates in the Tigris rivers or is it quite high up in the landscape? What should we be envisaging on the ground at Göbekli Tepe? Okay, at Göbekli Tepe 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.
It's a hilly region. We're overlooking the Haran Plain to the south. We're about 400 or 500 metres above the Haran Plain, so about 770 metres above sea level. the foothills of the eastern tourist mountains. come across southern Turkey. And actually from the site itself, when you look northwards, I was actually there just last week, it's been snowing in the mountains there. And from the Göbekli Tepe site, you can actually look northwards towards the eastern Taurus and see the snow-covered peaks.
You can actually see Nemrutta, which is another UNESCO World Heritage Site there in the region, a bit younger than Göbekli Tepe, obviously. But it's like a Taurus foothill sort of region looking down onto the plain of Haran, which then extends southwards into northern Syria.
And Nemrida, is that Mount Nemrida with those famous sculptures of faces in the big rock? Yes, the Kingdom of Komagene and so on. So that's a topic for another day indeed. Now, in regards to when we're talking about with Göbekli Tepe, in passingly, you also mentioned that whole process of... Neolithicization. And I might get that. I might butcher the wording of that. With that whole process, I mean, how far back are we going with the story of Göbekli Tepe?
Okay, I mean, Gebekitab itself doesn't date back to the very sort of, you know... Neolithicization is something that happened over a very long period of time. It didn't actually start in the early Holocene. The components of that package, neolithic package, we often talk about different components in that package, like being...
settled, like sedentism, or domestication of animals, secondary products like milk and sheep and animal traction. It's all part of that nilithisation sort of story, whereby the earliest sort of signs of that... sedentism are much earlier than Gobekli Tepper 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. But of course, Gobekli Tepe comes in about 9,600, 9,500 BC. So at the beginning of the early Holocene, which is the climate amelioration, following the end of the Younger Dryas. So the Younger Dryas is a 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...
become much more lush in this area. And you get the first settled communities coming in. And Gebekli Tepe is one of the first I'd 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 Turkey.
I know it's a bit more complicated than this, but is it almost like kind of that transitional phase between what has often been terms like hunter gatherers kind of very you know moving around small groups small communities of people into what will ultimately be thousands of years later in that area be like the emergence of farming and you know settled communities
and ultimately the emergence of cities, that kind of transitional period. That's right. I mean, interestingly, I mean, from the... period before Bekitepe, 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 a continuous occupation from the younger dryers. We already have a settlement, actually, into the early Holocene, and that's sort of continuous. whereby with us in Chandler, 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. And I think it's just a question of time with the more intense investigations going on down in the region now. I think we will find the predecessors of Gobekli Tepe. There is one site that's quite early that's within the frame of the Tash Tepele project looking at these. sites in the region, the Neolithic sites.
which is PPNA 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. Well, that's another term that we should address straight away. You said PPNA there, and I think there's PPNB2. What do we mean by these two terms?
Okay, I mean, PPN is the abbreviation for pre-pottery Neolithic, which means, as I said earlier, we have this sort of Neolithicization 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 cultivation of wild cereal.
So it's getting there gradually, but we don't have pottery yet. That's why 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. So, you know, 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. 8,700, we've got the PPNB coming in with the early PPNB, which goes about 8,200. And the middle PPNB starts, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, we're looking really at the early. The PPNA is the earliest sort of manifestation of this sort of pre-Portrianolithic in the region. Do we know why this area of the world would have been so attractive to these people some 10,000 years ago?
Should we be imagining some changes in the topography 10,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age that made it more attractive than other areas for these early people to start? becoming more sedentary in places like this? I don't think there are any sort of major changes in the topography. I mean, I think that came a bit later with farming, and 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. Of course, Göbekli 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.
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. There's 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. But in the early Holocene, so at the time of Göbekli Tepe, it would have been a lot different. It would have been a sort of open woodland with oak and wild almond.
There would have been lots of grasses, and 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. 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. 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.
Well, the work by yourself and the team and everyone who's been working at Göbekli Tepe is slowly revealing more and more about the site. Just quickly on that, Lee, I mean, how long has archaeological work been going on at Göbekli Tepe? How long has the site been known? Okay, the site was first discovered in the 1960s, in fact. It was a survey operation looking for a Neolithic site.
And that was conducted by Halit Chambel, who was a professor at the University of Istanbul, and also with colleagues from the United States. from Chicago, in fact, 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.
And for a long time, it was thought that, you know, Turkey was the modern sort of Anatolian Peninsula was avoided by the Neolithic because I thought, you know, 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 Neolithic activity. In Anatolia, for example, Chatalhuyuk would be a site that was discovered at this time as well. The work of Melard there and Hajala.
But of course, in the southeastern part of the country, we have then sites like Chayonu. which were discovered in the course of this survey. But also Gobekli Teppel was discovered during their survey work, but was never excavated at the time, when it wasn't actually excavated until the mid-1990s.
And then from then on, has it been season on season, even with COVID, learning more about the site? 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...
The excavation director was doing the work down there with the channel of a museum, and he was then followed by his student, Klaus Schmidt, who is really well known. Through his excavations at Gobekli Tepe, he was always... involved in the fieldwork 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. But yeah, I mean, the site has been now under excavation for about 30 years. Well, there you go. Well, I think we've set the context then really nicely for our chat now to delve into the archaeology so far uncoveredly. And I feel we need to discuss first of all...
I guess those big buildings at Göbekli Tepe that the site is most famous for. Now, what are these structures that always seem to be at the centre of any newspaper article or any discussion of Göbekli Tepe today that the site is known for, first of all? I'm holding myself back, Liam. Very good. Because, of course, I'm not too keen on that word. Of course, it's actually in the media, 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. I refer to these structures as special building. Because they are special and they're buildings for that very simple reason. And regarding their function, I think, of course, there were probably ritual centers. There were rituals taking place in these structures. But at the same time, they're also being used for...
People were identifying themselves or the groups were identifying themselves with these structures. They hold narratives. If you look at the pillars that are in these buildings with all of these carvings, those are narratives. Those are stories that meant something to these people. So a lot more to do with identity, with community, with coming together.
ritual. So I think temple would be a too narrow definition. And apart from that, of course, the term temple is very often associated with dialogue. modern connotations of what religion is or religion. And of course, that's something we need to get away from because we're 12,000 years ago. So what should we be imagining with those structures? You set kind of that explanation of
various parts of these buildings that we're going to explore, like the art as well and these pillars. But for someone who actually doesn't know what these buildings look like, how should we be imagining these large buildings that seem to always take up so much of the story of Göbekli Tepe? Okay, I mean, we've got, so far, we have, I think, eight excavated or partially excavated special buildings.
A to H, I think A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, S, 8, 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, 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. Oh, wow. And at regular intervals in the wall, you have sort of T-pillars. monoliths, T-shaped, carved mainly or mostly in one piece from the natural limestone in the area at the site. sometimes 10, 11, 12 in the circle within the walls. And in the centre or near to the centre of the building, we have two upright T-pillars.
which are larger. For example, if we're looking at building D, which is one of the most impressive of the preserved or most impressive of the buildings that we can see there today, the central pillars are about five and a half meters in height. So really quite, when you stand next to them and 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. And of course, on top of this structure would have been a roof.
We know they were roofed over. And I think perhaps the really most intriguing of our new results is that these buildings were occupied. or were in use for a very long period of time. You know, 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 built to one planet and then completed, but it was a constantly changing structure. But I love that you can get quite accurate dates.
from just examining is it that early mortar discovered between those local limestone blocks and you can analyse that building material to get a sense of how long this structure was used. That's the only way of doing it. I mean, 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. You know, we can't take them at face value because, of course, you've always got to think about sort of 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.
That is so extraordinary. I always associate mortar with much later constructions, for instance. It's a sticky mud mixture. Thank you for highlighting that. Also, just to highlight quickly, you mentioned local limestone used for the production.
Is it all like all the stone artifacts that you have surviving, whether it's the walls or these T pillars, which we'll explore a bit more in a second, is it all created from locally acquired stone? They're not doing huge distances to bring stone to the site. No, I think the local limestone, I mean, it's a limestone plateau where these buildings actually constructed a pond.
And in actual fact, a few of the buildings of these special buildings were actually constructed directly on the limestone plateau. And the limestone plateau is the floor of the buildings. And that plateau has been painstakingly smooth. So it's very possible that they're quarrying the teplas from the spot where they were probably more or less erected and put upright, and then the floor was then smoothed.
Bob's your uncle. There's your floor, and it's very high quality, obviously. Other buildings have plaster floors, which are imitating probably these natural limestone floors. So, you know, these guys knew what they were doing. It was a very advanced technology. I mean, we can't actually imagine there's being, often people say, ah, you know, cavemen. No. They were like us. They were physically like us. cognitively perhaps a little 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've been sort of you know on their mobiles looking at instagram you know well let's explore these t pillars a bit more now lee because they are absolutely extraordinary and i think the clues in the name in the kind of shape so kind of a long
stem but the horizontal top part of a T is a bit smaller than you'd usually imagine for let's say a capital letter T today but with these big stone artefacts, I guess these kind of sculpture things. How big are we talking with them, Lee? life-size or bigger than life-size? Yeah, okay. I mean, if we're talking about the T-pillers, 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 are about three metres, three and a half metres. So they're larger than... us, you know, larger than human. That's why we sort of speak about monumentality. But of course, you know, monumentality is also relative. I mean, for us, they're not really monumental for our understanding. You know, if we stand in a city and there's a skyscraper that's like, you know, dozens of stories high, that's more monumental for us.
Like five, six metres height 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 metres, six metre high monoliths would have been very much monumental. And the monolith, so that's kind of like monolith, so one stone, is that what the meaning is? One piece, yeah, that's right.
Is the evidence from Göbekli Tepe the earliest dateable evidence we know of for monumentality, for the creation of monuments by humans? Like I said, it's a perspective thing. For a hunter-gatherer, even if they put up A thousand years before that, if they'd put up a three metre high wooden whatever, that would have been for them, I think, monumental. But yeah, I mean, strictly speaking, you know...
For example, our UNESCO application, our 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 it's, 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. Lee, 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 so yeah i don't like working with superlatives i just hate it no exactly and you mentioned other sites in the region and i guess just a couple of names quickly before we explore more about the art itself
Are these names like Kaharan Tepe today? Is that one of the key sisters? Yeah, for example, Kaharan Tepe is one, Göbekli 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 T-pillar sites down there. And there are smaller sites as well. And names like Navalichori would be the cyborg.
Sefer Tepe. So there are numerous now. We have a dozen sites we now know down there in the region. But these three sites, Ayanlar, 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.
Are they quite close together? So, I mean, potentially after more research suggesting whether there was interactions between the settlements? There were definitely interactions. I mean, we have the symbolism. I mean, there are differences. There's lots of similarities, but there are nuances and differences between, for example, in the symbolism, whereby at Gebekli Tepe you have more animals depicted, at Karahan Tepe there's more of a focus on the human form.
So we're just starting to see that because the excavations at these other sites at Carahan, for example, only started back in 2019. So it's really that's just coming out now and we're seeing the first sort of... making the first comparisons with our material. So that's something that we need to watch out for in the future. A network was there, economic, cultural, social. It was definitely there.
It's all very exciting stuff. You mentioned how there's a lot of depictions of animals on Göbekli Tepe or at Göbekli Tepe. Is it on these T-pillars that you see quite a lot of that animal art? Yeah. Of course, you get smaller figurines and that sort of thing. But the majority that we know of is actually sort of applied or carved into or from the pillars. So you have low relief.
which are a couple of centimetres protruding from the pillar. Then you have high release of statues that are actually carved from the pillar itself, but still attached to the pillar. It's 3D, yeah. Yeah, 3D. What kind of animals are being shown? 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 leopard.
the auroch, the wild boar. 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 the focal point of the building. I'd say sort of dangerous animals, also lots of insects, snakes, scorpions. So they're sort of a bit sort of... This has all been interpreted in various ways in the past. For example, Klaus Schmidt, the previous excavator, associated it with death myths and death rituals.
and others with fear. So there's lots of different ways of doing this. But of course, the fact is that they're concentrating on these animals that had some sort of power, which were obviously important for their narratives. stories were attached to them. Of course, they're choosing these leopards and wild boars. I love them. It's also interesting. There are wild animals that have been depicted that they would have seen in the landscape. I'm guessing then are there no depictions of
mythical creatures or something like that that might be attached to a particular story or something? 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 war on an auroch and I'm going to sort of put it on my pillar now. But no, they come in different constellations. And I think... We're actually seeing here narratives, and that's the most important thing.
And this is why, in my opinion, Gobekli Tepe is so important. It's not just the monumentality, but it's actually the fact. narratives which were previously oral narratives, so told by storytellers around the campfire, which for the first time are being petrified. They're being sort of carved into stone and they're preserved for us today. And I think these narratives are very much are telling us the traditions and the stories of the foundation myth.
of hunter-gatherer populations dating before the Neolithic, before this whole process took off. In that respect, they're so valuable. And 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.
Do you think there's also the benefits of the limestone material? Now, correct me if I'm wrong, I thought limestone is quite soft. So is it easier for them to use their stone tools to carve out these sculptures and this art in that particular stone? 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, but also for minerals. Because, of course, what I didn't mention just now is the fact that we've found colour remains of colour on the statue of the wild boar that I mentioned from two years ago. So they were using sort of a red pigment.
which have probably been sort of grinding up and applying to the statues, but also to the pillars. 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. Do we think from Oka or something else? Yeah. And so you have those.
sculptures there. Shall we briefly talk about the human sculptures as well? I know there are less than of the animals that you highlighted, but are they quite interesting to talk about too? Yeah, I mean, the thing is, of course, you say there are less... human depictions, but the T pillars themselves are depictions of a human form. The actual shaft of the pillar is the body, and the T at the top is in the head.
So we know that because we have in building D, the two central pillars in the center of that building, they have actually carved arms in low relief. They have a belt, 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. And I chose not to. But they're very clearly, the T form is a depiction of the human form, albeit very sort of abstract.
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 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're shown with arms in different sort of gestures.
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 Göbekli Tepe. What does Gobekli Tepe and Pompeii have in common? There you go. It's very interesting. So kind of to wrap up this.
part about those special buildings that you've highlighted there Lee and I'm glad we covered it first because there's such that that thing everyone thinks about if we don't use the label temple but we keep that kind of extraordinary special label there too could we imagine them always being kind of like multi-purpose centers of these communities places where people could gather tell stories or maybe kind of
food storage or something like that or should we just not be imagining them as serving one purpose but probably had lots of different purposes for these people yeah exactly that lots of different purposes i mean you mentioned all of those that we just mentioned but Also, you've got to remember, these people are going for a very...
important, crucial transition at this time. When you're a hunter-gatherer, you're more mobile, your groups are smaller. When you start settling down, your group size increases. All of a sudden, you're having more children. 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?
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 that are perhaps places of conflict mitigation, where people are coming together to mitigate those problems. 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. And for that reason, we shouldn't actually sort of, you know, narrow it down just to this sort of one function by using the word or the term term.
I mean, you know, packed with this incredible art and 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 and I'm really glad we could cover all of that in detail.
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 Göbekli Tepe or how they treated their dead away from those great buildings? I mean, we always thought that burials would be in the special buildings, you know, at least of some sort of important individuals. But because, of course, you know, with the changes taking place in this sort of population.
At that time, an increasing number of people, you'd expect some sort of incipient hierarchisation because, of course, these societies or hunter-gatherer societies are well known to be quite egalitarian, although egalitarian doesn't really exist, strictly speaking. We haven't found any burials in the special building so far. I say so far. It can always happen. What we do have is quite characteristic for the region itself.
and for the time, so for the pre-Portrian Unithic period in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean, which is subfloor burial. So we have two burials so far at Quebeci Tepe. and all of them from domestic contexts, because, of course, that's something also that's quite important for Gebekli Tebbe, that we've now realised it's not just a ritual site.
because there was like discussions previously oh it's just you know people coming there regular part times in the year to celebrate and to build these But of course, now we know it's a settlement, we have the domestic context, we have the houses, and beneath the house floors, you frequently get burials in this period. So 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. So 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 area.
And we have two such burials at Gobekli Tepe. We have one which is, I think, a teenager in her early 20s, a female individual in a hocker position, so sort of crouched and laying as it's 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. With particular individuals, we 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. We don't have any plastered skulls at Gobekli Tepe, but we do have fragments of skull with 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 and decorated them.
And there are also drill holes in them that they're perhaps using to suspend them. and to hang them. You see it sometimes in ethnographical examples that they have mummies of dead people that they bring out at certain times of the year for certain festivals. That could be similar here. They could have the skulls coming out. 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 on to that knowledge. And they probably knew that the knowledge was in the brain, in the skull, that was the seat of the spirit. And of course, the ancestors were the all-knowing. And they did that, I think, to celebrate the ancestors. So ancestor, veneration, animism was at the centre of the rituals and the belief systems at this time.
I was thinking during your explanation there, Lee. I know it's several thousand years later, but having done stuff in the past on... some of the great tombs that they ultimately build for like the richest in society but with a clear idea of building something massive potentially to show off like the wealth or the status of that family and everyone's involved in the building of it.
It's fascinating if there's no similar kind of big burial mounds from Gebekli Tepe in that society. You'd have thought that might be a human nature thing.
if they saw themselves as more important, would ultimately try and get a big burial for themselves. Yeah, it's funny you say that because there are a couple of sites, I mean, excavated quite a few years ago now at Chayun, 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 worked.
And that's located further to the east of Gobekli Tepe in the Diyarbaka region. And 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. But interestingly, just recently in the frame of the new investigations in the Orfa region at a site called Cefatepa, 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. 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. Not very archaeological of me. This is the ancients. We cover all different terms of language for this, which is great.
But you did mention in passing there, so kind of residential structures. So do we have evidence of residential buildings, of houses, of dwellings at Göbekli Tepe? And if so, what do they look like? Yeah, I mean, as I said, we now know that the site was not a purely ritual site as previously sort of. But in fact, it was a settlement from the offset. So in fact, we've got a couple of new, I say new back in 2017-18, we had two new canopies, 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 sun it's very hot and the sun etc but To construct these canopies, we had to remove sondages where the legs of these things were going to be anchored into the plateau. They couldn't drill through 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 little keyholes into the early settlement phases. Of course, at the bottom of the mound, that's the oldest accumulations, and the higher you get, the younger it gets. And we actually found evidence of domestic structures, rather, dwellings in these oldest... layers which are very small sort of round structures
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. producing beads from stone and bird bones, that sort of thing. The necklace things that you talked about earlier, the necklaces, right? 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. So, in fact, it's quite interesting because over the course of time, that's quite an important thing in the PPNA in this sort of period from 9,600 to 8,700. Buildings, whether domestic or special, were usually round or oval. And then at the onset of the PPNB, about 8,700 BC, they invent or the corner appears and they start building rectangular buildings.
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 building. At the time of the PPNB, I think, we were looking at a very much a flourishing settlement, very much a village or perhaps even bigger. 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. And we don't have radiocarbon dates enough with high resolution enough to say, okay, they're contemporaneous. So it could well be they're moving around the actual site itself.
Perhaps they sort of, first of all, they're in the northwestern part of the site. It all gets a bit sort of, you know, 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. And that's the way this mound then develops over the 1,500 years of occupation of the site. So the dating is still...
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. Wow. I mean, you mentioned hardens there. So I'm guessing those hardens there where they were presumably cooking and having the fireplaces, but also you mentioned rubbish dumps as well.
Are these key areas in the settlement for learning more about the people themselves and how they lived? What foods they ate alongside the gazelle that you've mentioned earlier? Yeah, I mean, the rubbish dumps. We'll say the rubbish pit. are very much important for us. And archaeologists stream the rubbish. 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 in fact interestingly we have hunting traps in the vicinity of Gebekli Teb, the so-called kites or desert kites. are known from Jordan, for example. We have them also in Gbekti Tepe in the Tash Tepele region.
of Shanlu'ufa. So actually we're looking at sort of organised 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. You know, and water, water resources, I'm drifting tangents now. That's okay, that's okay. You know, water supply was crucial.
I mean, it was always thought, you know, Gobekli Tepe had no water supply. People were walking to a water source, perhaps, you know, kilometres away from the site and coming back and, you know. But we don't know whether there was, you know, perhaps there was a spring at the site that's no longer active. But in the meantime, we do have very good evidence for assistance.
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. And they were harvesting that rainwater in large systems. and collecting it via channels into these large pits, and that being used at the site as a...
I mean, you read my mind. I was going to ask about cisterns and the kind of the channeling of water. So they had that early technology even back then to funnel water into, as you say, this area where the natural... water resources are quite far away. To me personally, someone who was always fascinated in, whether it be sewers or aqueducts or water management, the fact that they had cisterns there some 10,000 years ago, that is an astonishing piece of archaeology.
overlooked compared to like those big special buildings and so on Lee yeah that's right I mean we haven't got the latrines yet I'd like to find a toilet I haven't got one of those yet but we're still looking for one of those these lithics that you mentioned earlier are these just kind of like scraping tools or the kinds of things that would have been used for either kind of
creating clothing or stuff like that? Would they have been the tools that they would have used? 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.
And of course, you know, this is made from local material. 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. And 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.
Apart from that, of course, for the carving of the tea pillars, we don't actually have a workshop where we can actually say 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. 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. Yeah, so that was going on. Yeah, and of course I mentioned the basalt, which was not far away, used for the grinding tools.
And 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. So that also testifies some sort of down the line sort of. contact with groups living further to the north in the more mountainous region.
I mean, Lee, you've painted a wonderful picture of this society. These people are living some 10,000 years ago. It's an astonishing story, that of Göbekli Tepe. It sounds like there's going to be even more coming out to the ground very shortly. But you also painted the picture how over time the site evolves and it seems to develop into a very kind of prosperous and bigger settlement. So the big question is, what ultimately happens to Göbekli Tepe? Does it all fall off a cliff? What do we know?
We have very little evidence for what was going on at Gebekli Tepe after around the end of the 9th millennium BC, so 8000 BC, it all starts to disappear. And of course, that's a time that we get more and more... 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 fact that people are now turning away from these hunter-gatherer traditions. to this more farming sort of...
these farming traditions with regard to their subsistence. And, of course, the changes in subsistence go hand in hand with changes in society, perhaps changes in belief systems. Because, of course, after Kubeki Tepe, these big... enclosures or these big special buildings, they also disappear. We don't have anything comparable until the late Chalcolytic, the Bronze Age in free history. So that's quite remarkable.
I think the reason is that it was actually the farming. Of course, the location of Gobekitep at the moment, or even then at the time, is very hilly, very rocky, and it's not very... good for farming. 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. Recently, I proposed that we don't have any good evidence for social hierarchies or the elites at this time in the pre-Portrian Neolithic. I think it was very much to do with the fact that they didn't really exist. you know, inspired individuals, charismatic individuals, which were sort of playing that role, perhaps gifted storytellers or, I don't know, shamans, that sort of thing, taking on that role.
And of course, they were no longer needed. It changed. People came away from that. And of course, when subsistence changed, belief system changed, social structures changed, the site was no longer needed in that respect. Well, Lee, this has been a fascinating chat. We've explored all these different parts of the amazing archaeological story of Gobekli Tepe.
And it sounds like there's still so much more archaeology to uncover, but also then to record and preserve for many years and decades ahead. Oh, we've got a lot of work left to do. I mean, excavations. You know, we've been criticised for saying that it's going to take generations of archaeologists to actually complete work at Göbekli Tepe.
In fact, there's no need to actually escalate the whole site. It's always like we have to save something for the next generations coming along of archaeologists with better methodologies. So it's really a question of preserving what we're excavating, what we have excavated previously.
I'm making that really sort of visible and available to the public and anyone interested. So yeah, that's our task at hand. 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. Well, you've certainly completed part of that task by speaking to the ancients today, and we really appreciate your time. Lee, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Well, thanks again for having me, Tristan.
There was Dr. Lee Clare giving you an awesome overview of the archaeology so far uncovered at Gobekli Tepe and why this site is so interesting, so incredible, really interesting to see what will be unearthed.
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