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From the Göbekli Tepe Research Project

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Generating social cohesion at Göbekli Tepe

How did they do it? Making and moving monoliths at Göbekli Tepe

3. May 2016 /

The T-shaped pillars discovered at Göbekli Tepe are big. The central pair of Enclosure D measure 5.5 m and weigh about 8 to 10 metric tons each. The surrounding pillars are smaller, but still reach around 4 m. How Stone Age people were able to make these pillars and to transport them seems a mystery to many of the site’s visitors. We can however offer some answers to both questions, as we are in the lucky situation to know where the pillars come from.

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Göbekli Tepe lies at the highest point of the Germuş mountain range, on an otherwise barren limestone plateau. The plateau served as raw material source for Göbekli Tepe’s buildings (Photo: M. Morsch, ©DAI).

Göbekli Tepe lies on an otherwise barren limestone plateau at the highest point of the Germuş mountain range. The quarry areas for the megalithic workpieces lie on exactly that plateau. As there are several loci with impressive traces of the Stone Age masons, the plateau forms part of the archaeological site and reservation.

The location for the quarries was not chosen without reason. The limestone surrounding Göbekli Tepe is banked, strata of about 0.60 – 1.50 m thickness are divided by fault lines. This means that you just have to dig around a work piece, not also beneath it. As limestone goes, the material at Göbekli Tepe is pretty hard and cristalline, and there are no carstic phenomena. Which means that it is a first class raw material for sculpting and masonry. Even the hardest limestone is however so soft that it can easily be worked by flint tools.

Flint picks, and possibly also wooden tools were used to dig channels in the form of the desired workpiece into the limestone. The Stone Age quarry workers would choose a location on the plateau where the banks had approximately the thickness of the final piece. When they reached the fault line, most probably wooden beams and wedges were used to lift the piece out. Although the limestone at Göbekli Tepe is of good quality, in several cases something went wrong and nearly finished pillars, stone blocks, rings and other pieces were left in the quarries. This is an especially lucky situation for the archaeologist, as we can observe the techniques employed first hand.

Göbekli Tepe

A T-shaped pillar of approximately 7 m length left in the quarries on the western plateau (Photo: © DAI).

Most impressive is a T-shaped pillar far out on the edge of the western plateau. The location shows another work-reduction strategy: if you start at the edge of the plateau, you do not have very much material to remove on one side. And you know exactly how thick the limestone bank is before you start. The pillar still lying here is the largest discovered so far at Göbekli Tepe. It has 7 m and is 1.5 m thick. Why exactly it was left at the quarry site is not clear. A small crack may have formed in the stone during work, or some kind of natural flaw became visible. With workpieces that big, small flaws mean an instability that will most likely cause the pillar to break during transport or installation at its final location. In this case, the distance to the tell is several hundred meters. Another possibility is that the project turned out to be just a little too big in the end.

For the second part of such a project, the transport, direct traces are absent from Göbekli Tepe. Ethnographic evidence from Indonesia, where megaliths are built still today at grave sites, hints at sledges and wooden planks as the tools of choice. The number of people involved is hard to guess. The distances the monoliths had to be hauled to the tell are comparatively small at Göbekli Tepe, in the worst case about 500m, in the best less than 100m. But the monoliths hewn from the bedrock are large and heavy, in case of the 7.0m pillar the weight would have been around 50 metric tons. Ethnographic records from the early 20th century report that on the Indonesian island of Nias 525 men were involved in hauling a megalith of 4 cubic meters (considerably smaller than at GT) over a distance of 3 km (considerably more than at GT) to its final location in 3 days using a wooden sledge (Schröder 1917). That such a large number of participants is not necessarily caused by the labour involved exclusively, shows another example from Indonesia. In Kodi, West Sumba, the transport of the stones themselves used for the construction of megalithic tombs is ritualised and asks for a large number of people involved as witnesses (Hoskins 1986).

So, even if the making of the large pillars is not such a big mystery, and absolutely possible with Stone Age tools and detailed knowlegde of the raw materials (no need to involve aliens here!), there are still some open questions to resolve.

Bibliography:
Hoskins, J. A. (1986) So My Name Shall Live: Stone-Dragging and Grave-Building in Kodi, West Sumba. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 142/1, 31–51.

Schröder, E. E. W. (1917) Nias, ethnographische, geographische en historische aanteekeningen en studien. Leiden: Brill.

Further reading:
Klaus Schmidt, Göbekli Tepe. Eine Beschreibung der wichtigsten Befunde erstellt nach den Arbeiten der Grabungsteams der Jahre 1995-2007, in: Erste Tempel – frühe Siedlungen. 12000 Jahre Kunst und Kultur. Ausgrabungen und Forschungen zwischen Donau und Euphrat. Herausgegeben für ArchaeNova e.V., Isensee, Oldenburg (2009) 187-223.

Jens Notroff, Oliver Dietrich, Klaus Schmidt, Building Monuments – Creating Communities. Early monumental architecture at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe. In: James Osborne (Hrsg.), Approaching Monumentality in the Archaeological Record. Albany: SUNY Press (2014), 83-105.

10th ICAANE, Vienna

24. April 2016 /

The 10th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE – external link) will be held between 25‒29 April, 2016, in Vienna. The Göbekli Tepe research team will take part in the workshop “Iconography and Symbolic Meaning of the Human in Near Eastern Prehistory” organized by Jörg Becker, Claudia Beuger and Bernd Müller-Neuhof with a paper on “Anthropomorphic Iconography at Göbekli Tepe”.

We are scheduled for April 28, 10.00 o´clock.

Anthropomorphic Iconography at Göbekli Tepe

Oliver Dietrich, Lee Clare, Jens Notroff

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Fragmented anthropomophic sculpture, found in 2014 (Image: DAI, Photo N. Becker).

The early Aceramic Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in Upper Mesopotamia stands out as one of the extraordinary sites from the early Holocene. Dating to a time of early sedentary communities and coinciding with the very beginnings of processes that culminate in the domestication of plants and animals, the Göbekli Tepe site is well known for its impressive megalithic architecture. This takes the form of large circular monumental enclosures, also comprising impressive T-shaped pillars. These pillars carry characteristic
anthropomorphic features in low-relief, such as hands, arms, and items of clothing. In addition to these larger-than-life monolithic figures, the site has also produced various other forms of anthropomorphic representations. These include depictions of humans carved onto the surfaces of the T-pillars themselves, limestone sculptures and figurines, and engravings on stone plaquettes.
In this paper, we focus on different expressions of anthropomorphic depiction at the site, and propose that the observable variety could correlate with diverging levels of symbolic meaning, providing unparalleled insights into human worldview at this important transition in human history.

Hope to see you there!

Limestone vessel from Göbekli Tepe with tentative evidence for oxalate (Copyright DAI, photo O. Dietrich).

Out for a beer at the dawn of agriculture

24. April 2016 /

Ever since the so called Braidwood Symposium in 1953 (Braidwood et al. 1953), there has been a debate as to whether beer – and not bread – was the first product made from domesticated crops (e.g. Katz and Voigt 1986). Based on the discovery of grain at the site of Qalat Jarmo, and at the suggestion of the archaeo-botanist Sauer, Braidwood inquired whether or not the discovery of fermentation could have been the spark that triggered the targeted selection, and ultimately domestication, of certain crops. Fermented grain, which sees its starch transformed into sugars, is well known for its beneficial properties, including an increase in nutritional value, also making it easier to digest. Indeed, the participants at the aforementioned symposium eventually came to the consensus that early grain crops would have been far better suited to the production of gruel or beer than bread, especially considering that the glumes of primitive domesticated plants would have adhered to the grain. Even though this idea (fermentation) was raised frequently in subsequent years (Katz and Voigt 1986), particularly in the context of the previously noted advantages (higher nutritional value) afforded by this process, it was considered improbable that beer was actually produced. More recently, however, the discussion was revisited in a contibution by P. McGovern (2009) who presented preliminary results from chemical studies made on two stone vessels from the PPN necropolis at Körtik Tepe which yielded traces of tartaric acid that accrues during the wine production process (McGovern 2009: 81).

Figure 1

A barrel- (upper right) and a trough-like (lower right) limestone vessel from Göbekli Tepe (Photos: N. Becker, © DAI). Six vessels with capacities up to 160 l were discovered so far in situ (left).

Recently, further chemical analyses were conducted by M. Zarnkow (Technical University of Munich, Weihenstephan) on six large limestone vessels from Göbekli Tepe. These (barrel/trough-shaped) vessels, with capacities of up to 160 litres, were found in-situ in PPNB contexts at the site. Already during excavations it was noted that some vessels carried grey-black adhesions. A first set of analyses made on these substances returned partly positive for calcium oxalate, which develops in the course of the soaking, mashing and fermenting of grain. Although these intriguing results are only preliminary, they provide initial indications for the brewing of beer at Göbekli Tepe, thus provoking renewed discussions relating to the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages at this early time. Further, they are particularly significant in light of results from genetic analyses, undertaken by a team from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Oslo, which have suggested that the earliest domestication of grain occurred in the vicinity of the Karacadağ, i.e. very near to Göbekli Tepe (Heun et al. 1997 [external link]). Once again, we must ask whether the production of alcohol and the domestication of grain are interrelated. Finally, the aforementioned insights also provoke new questions relating to the use and consumption of alcohol at Göbekli Tepe, which may have been in the context of religiously motivated feasts and celebrations. Not surprisingly, such events are well attested in the ethnographic literature as a means of attracting and motivating large groups of people to undertake communal work and projects (Dietler and Herbich 1995).

Further reading:
Dietrich, O., Heun, M., Notroff, J, Schmidt, K., Zarnkow, M. (2012) The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey. Antiquity 86, 333: 674-695 (full text – external link).

Works cited:
Braidwood, R.J. & L.S. Braidwood. 1953. The Earliest Village Communities of Southwestern Asia. Journal of World History 1: 278–310.

Dietler, M. & I. Herbich 1995. Feasts and labor mobilization. Dissecting a fundamental economic practice, in Dietler, M. & B. Hayden (ed.), Feasts. Archaeological and ethnographic perspectives on food, politics, and power, 240-264. Washington / London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Heun, M., R. Schäfer-Pregl, D. Klawan, R. Castagna, M. Accerbi, B. Borghi & F. Salamini. 1997. Site of Einkorn wheat domestication identified by DNA fingerprinting. Science 278: 1312-1314.

Katz, S.H. & M.M. Voigt. 1986. Bread and Beer: The Early Use of Cereals in the Human Diet. Expeditions 28 (2): 23-34.

McGovern, P.E. 2009. Uncorking the past. The quest for wine, beer, and other alcoholic beverages. Berkeley / Los Angeles / London: University of California Press.

Why did it have to be snakes?

23. April 2016 /

Snakes are omnipresent at Göbekli Tepe. Even today you may have the luck to encounter a Levantine Viper when visiting the site (yes, they are poisonous, but just let them be, they are also protected by the Washington Convention). In most cases you will only see their image in stone. Snakes are among the most often depicted animals at Göbekli Tepe. They appear on pillars, on porthole stones, on small stone plaquettes and shaft straightheners. Especially Enclosure A is full of them. Pillar 1, one of the central pillars of this building, shows what seems to be a net of snakes.

(Photos: K. Schmidt, N. Becker, DAI.)

A recent (2013) find of a small fragment of a stone plaquette from a deep sounding in trench K10-13 shows a very similar motif. Two snake heads and below them a net-like depiction of interwoven snake bodies are clearly visible. The motif seems to have been of such importance that it was reproduced in handy size to be carried around. Why this preoccupation with snakes?
A first explanation is that they fit very well in the range of animals depicted at Göbeklki Tepe. The site crawls with dangerous insects, scorpions, scolopenders; and the mammals depict are not any more friendly. This has something to do with the overall meaning of the site. Much of Göbekli´s iconography is related to early Neolithic death rites.
But there is another aspect to the apparent popularity of snakes at Göbekli Tepe.

(Photo: N. Becker, DAI)

On the front side of Pillar 20 in Enclosure D, we see a snake moving towards an aurochs. The aurochs´ body is seen from the side, the head from above. The position of the head, lowered for attack, could be in futile defence to the snake. The aurochs´ legs are depicted oddly flexed, which could indicate his defeat and near death. As could the size of the snake which is depicted considerable larger than the aurochs. If this depiction really shows a battle between snake and aurochs, in which the snake prevails, there would be room for some interesting, but of course hypothetical, connections to other aspects of Göbekli´s material culture.

As mentioned, centipedes/millipedes and snakes are animals often depicted on PPN shaft straighteners. Morenz & Schmidt (2009) have taken this observation as a starting point to propose a metaphorical relation between the depiction and the object worked with the shaft straighteners. Form and deadliness of snake and arrow were maybe perceived as similar or at least wished to be. A further analogy could be seen between the fast flying arrow and the fast attack of the snake. There is vast ethnographical evidence for big game hunting with poisoned projectiles. If we start from the not completely unlikely hypothesis that this could have been the case also in the Neolithic, the image on Pillar 20 could possibly refer to this complex of analogies and metaphors, and could be ’read‘ as a depiction of a hunt in the widest sense, without the representation of an actual human actor.

Further Reading:
Morenz, L.D. & Schmidt, K.  2009. Große Reliefpfeiler und kleine Zeichentäfelchen. Ein frühneolithisches Zeichensystem in Obermesopotamien, in: Petra Andrássy – Julia Budka – Frank Kammerzell (Hrsg.), Non-Textual Marking Systems, Writing and Pseudo Script from Prehistory to Modern Times, Lingua Aegyptia – Studia monographica 8, Göttingen, 2009, 13-31.

Schmidt, K. 2014. „Adler und Schlange“ – „Großbilder“ des Göbekli Tepe und ihre Rezeption , in: Yalcin, Ünsal (Hrsg.), Anatolian Metall VI. Der Anschnitt Beiheft 25. Veröffentlichungen aus dem Deutschen Bergbau-Museum Nr. 195, Bochum 2013, 145-152. [read online – external link]

The mound of Göbekli Tepe. view from south. (Photo: German Archaeological Institute, Klaus Schmidt)

On Air: National Geographic’s “The Story of God”

23. April 2016 / / 0 Comments

In a current documentary series produced for and aired at the National Geographic Channel [external link], Hollywood-actor Morgan Freeman embarks on a journey to find out how religion connects people and where the power of belief actually comes from. The show is named “The Story of God” [external link] (and Freeman seems the obvious choice for hosting this, after all he once was God – on the big screen) and explores several chapters of the history of religion, ancient and modern.

In the upcoming episode “Creation” [external link], belief and myth are traced back to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East. A couple of fascinating archaeological sites and excavations are featured in that episode, among those our’s at Göbekli Tepe as well.

The episode will be airing this Sunday, April 24th 2016 at 9:00 pm EST / 8 pm CST on National Geographic Channel in the US, and later this week in 170 countries globally.

Sculpture of a snarling predator, limestone (Photo: DAI, Nico Becker).

Field Report: Autumn 2015

1. March 2016 / / 0 Comments

Like in recent seasons, this year’s field work was as well particularly focussing on the preparations regarding upcoming construction work of two permanent shelters upon the excavation areas at Göbekli Tepe. One is to be constructed in the so-called main excavation area in the mound’s south-eastern depression with monumental enclosures A-D, the other will cover excavation areas in the north-western depression. Already since 2011 excavations were conducted in the latter, leading – among others – to the discovery of  another early Neolithic circular enclosure (‘Enclosure H’, Fig. 1) with monumental T-pillars and another still not quite clearly addressable semi-circular structure with smaller and more narrow orthostat-like slabs.

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Fig. 1: Southern part of Enclosure H in the northwestern depression of Göbekli Tepe (Photo: DAI, Nico Becker).

After finishing all necessary sondages for the main excavation area’s shelter construction in 2013, all of the corresponding deep-soundings for shelter-struts in the north-western areas could have been excavated to the bedrock in spring 2015 (Fig. 2). Next to their important function in the construction of a permanent protection of the unique architecture unearthed at Göbekli Tepe, these sundaes furthermore were contributing new scientific insight. In one of these soundings in areas K10-13 and K10-23 a number of several curvilinear walls and several terrazzo floors were discovered already in the autumn of 2014. Even if, due to the limited character of these sondages, it is still difficult to evaluate the complete extent of these features, it becomes clear that this is a larger, hitherto unknown complex which needs to be topic of future research to be comprehended completely.

GT Westflächen Steinpläne 2015-05-08 A3 Übersicht (1) Kopie

Fig. 2: Excavation areas in the so-called north-western depression of Göbekli Tepe (Photos & Plan: DAI, Nico Becker).

This does also apply to another structure cut into the bedrock in area K10-55 which could have been excavated further as well in the course of this work. With a diameter of about 10 m and a depth of 2.8 m its function is still not completely clear as of yet, but again it is the backfill of this pit which is noteworthy: unlike the material dumped into the other known enclosure at Göbekli Tepe, basically consisting of fist-sized limestone rubble, animal bones, and flint artefacts, here large worked limestone objects and fragments of those (like T-pillars and so-called porthole stones) were stacked inside. The current state of excavation suggest a possible use as cistern to collect rain water maybe. Comparable yet much smaller pits were found on the adjacent rock plateaus as well and some rock-cut channels in the area support this interpretation. Again, further research will be necessary  for a concluding evaluation.

In K10-05 excavation were concluded as well, reaching the natural bedrock 5 m below the contemporary surface where another channel with a depth of 50 cm could have been documented.

Among those finds produced in the course of the work period reported here, two limestone sculptures should be emphasised: there is one carefully and detailed worked sculpture of a predator (Fig. 3) coming from K10-88 which belongs to the already well-represented type of teeth-baring mammals (in this case a leopard most likely). The second object comes from K10-13/23 and is best described as anthropomorphic sculpture (Fig. 4). Initially found to be lacking the head, this could have been recovered in the course of excavations as well and was successfully matched. This find mirrors a number of similar stone heads with breaking edges in the neck area which are often found in the backfilling of Göbekli Tepe’s monumental enclosures, deposited next to T-pillars.

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Fig. 3: Sculpture of a snarling predator, limestone (Photo: DAI, Nico Becker).

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Fig. 4: Anthropomorphic sculpture; torso and head, limestone (Photo: DAI, Nico Becker).

Furthermore, about 100 samples for 14C-dating could have been collected and analysed due to financial support by the John Templeton Foundation in the frame of the “Our Place: Our Place in the World” sub-project. These data will finally allow a deeper understanding of the chronological relation of Göbekli Tepe’s monumental enclosures. The renewed discussion of the site’s complex stratigraphy therefore remained a main research focus of this field season and beyond.

Further reading:
Becker, N., Dietrich, O., Götzelt, Th., Köksal-Schmidt, C., Notroff, J., Schmidt, K. 2012. Materialien zur Deutung der zentralen Pfeilerpaare des Göbekli Tepe und weiterer Orte des obermesopotamischen Frühneolithikums, Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie 5: 14-43.

Clare, L., Dietrich, O., Notroff, J. 2015. Göbekli Tepe, Türkei. Die Arbeiten der Jahre 2014 (Herbst) und 2015, e-Forschungsberichte des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts: 149-151 [read online – external link].

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