Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?

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 Sounds The 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: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 1:22Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:04Tristan Hughes?

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• 2:46Tristan Hughes?

  Six thousand 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 Gobekli 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.

• 3:29Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 4:03Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for having me.

• 4:34Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  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 on the same age with similar material culture. So it's the area itself, the region is very exciting.

• 4:56Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Okay, we're talking about south eastern Turkey. I mean, if you grab your map and Google Şan, you'll find the city in the south eastern 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 Neutization. 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 Neutization in the world.

• 5:39Tristan Hughes?

  So is it on the cusp of the fertile crescent that is the popular time today?

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:44Tristan Hughes?

  And with the topography of Gobekli Tepe today, should we be imagining, I mean, can you see the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers? Or is it quite high up in the landscape? What should we be envisaging on the ground at Gobekli Tepe?

• 5:55Speaker 03

  Okay, at Gobekli Tepe, you wouldn't see the Euphrates, in fact, from the site. We are quite a number of kilometers 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 The Heran Plain to the south, we're about 400 or 500 metres above the Heran Plain, so about 770 metres above sea level. The foothills of the eastern Taurus Mountains come through 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 Gobekli Tepe site, you can actually look northwards towards the eastern Taurus and see the snow-covered peaks.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  You can actually see Nemrudda, which is another UNESCO World Heritage Site there in the region, a bit younger than Gobekli Tepe, obviously. But it's like a Taurus foothill sort of region, looking down onto the plain of Heran, which then extends southwards into northern Syria.

• 6:53Tristan Hughes?

  And Nemrudda, is that Mount Nemrud with those famous sculptures of faces in the big rock? Yes, the Kingdom of Comogen and so on. I said that's a topic for another day indeed. Now, in regards to when we're talking about with Gobekli Tepe, in passing, Lee, you also mentioned that whole process of Neolithicisation, and I might get that, I might butcher the wording of that, but with that whole process, I mean, how far back are we going with the story of Gobekli Tepe?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Okay, I mean, Gobekli Tepe itself doesn't date back to the very sort of, you know, Neolithicisation is something that happened over a very long period of time. You know, it didn't actually start in the early Holocene, 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, it's all part of that Neolithicisation sort of story, whereby the earliest sort of signs of that sedentism are quite, are much earlier than Gobekli Tepe, and they appear in the Levant, in the late Palaeolithic, in the late Pleistocene. So, you know, we're talking about 15,000, 20,000 years before, or present, in fact.

• 8:01Tristan Hughes?

  So it's the Ice Age, that's still the Ice Age.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Late Ice Age, yeah. But of course, Gobekli Tepe comes in about 9,600, 9,500 B.C., so at the beginning of the early Holocene, which is the climate emigration, following the end of the Younger Dryas, so the Younger Dryas, sort of 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 Gobekli Tepe is one of the first, I say one of the first, not the first, there are much, there are earlier settled communities in the region, but one of the first settled communities appearing in southeastern parts of Turkey.

• 8:41Tristan Hughes?

  I know it's a bit more complicated than this, but is it almost like that transitional phase between what has often been in terms of 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?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  That's right. I mean, interestingly, I mean, from the period before Cabeckitepe, this sort of epipalaeolithic 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. We already have a settlement actually into the early Holocene and that's sort of continuous whereby with us in Shanawol, 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

• 9:45Speaker 03

  time with the more intense investigations going on down in the region now in Shanawol. I think we will find the predecessors of Cabeckitepe. 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, the 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.

• 10:14Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that's another term that we should address straight away. You said PPNA there, and I think there's PPNB too. What do we mean by these two terms?

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Okay. I mean, PPN is the abbreviation for pre pottery Neolithic.

• 10:26Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Which means, as I said earlier, we have this sort of Neutisation process going on and pottery, the production of pottery is one of the things that comes in during the Neutisation. And at this point in time, we have sedentary populations, we have, you know, other things going on like, I don't know, cultivation of wild cereal. But we don't yet have pottery. 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, you know, we distinguish between an early PPNB, a middle PPNB and a late PPNB.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  So, you know, to give you a rough sort of chronology for that, we said the PPNA starts roughly about 9,500 B.C. 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. The middle PPNB starts, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, we're looking really, the PPNA is the earliest sort of manifestation of this sort of pre-pottery neolithic in the region.

• 11:36Tristan Hughes?

  Do we know why this area of the world would have been so attractive to these people some 10,000 years ago? Would there have been, 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?

• 11:54Speaker 03

  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 you have the erosion, the luviation. And that's something that came in a bit later. Regarding the environment, I mean, obviously, any region that's settled by human beings, you know, they can use it. We're very adaptive, you know, we can adapt to most things. Of course, you know, 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 like the archaeobotanics and the archaeology that we're getting from the excavated sites, so the animal bones and the pollen, 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.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  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 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. In the wetter areas, you would have had wild boar, you would have had auroch, you would have had, you know, all of these animals running around. It would have been a very attractive place for hunters and gatherers.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  But at the same time, as I say, I mean, you get that all around the world and, and of course, the question as to why the settentism and why a Neolithic site was started here is, 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, you know, ten thousand, eleven thousand years ago in this region.

• 13:38Tristan Hughes?

  Well, the work by yourself and the team and everyone who's been working at Guebecle Tep 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 Guebecle Tep? How long has the site been known?

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Okay, the site was first discovered in the nineteen sixties, in fact, in a, in a, it was a survey operation looking for Neolithic sites, and that was conducted by Halit Çambel, who was a professor at the University of Istanbul. And also with colleagues from, from the United States, from Chicago, in fact, and, and they were doing a, a series of surveys in southeastern parts of Turkey and also in all that region down there, looking for first, you know, indications of, of the Neolithic in this region, because of course they had already found stuff in, 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, 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

• 14:37Speaker 03

  in, in Anatolia, for example, Çatol Huyuk would be a, a site that was discovered at this time as well. The work of Melad there and Hajla. But of course, in, in, in the southeastern part of the country, we have then, you know, sites like Chayonu, which were discovered in the course of this survey. But also Guebecle Tep was discovered during their survey work, but was never excavated at the time. I mean, it wasn't actually excavated until the mid nineteen nineties.

• 15:01Tristan Hughes?

  And then from then on, has it been season on season, even with Covid, of learning more about the site?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  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. Harold 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 Chanel of a museum. 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 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, 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.

• 15:50Tristan Hughes?

  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 Gobekli 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 Gobekli Tepe today that the site is known for, first of all?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Well, I'm very glad you didn't say the word temple.

• 16:15Tristan Hughes?

  I've been, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm holding myself back, Liam, I'm holding myself back.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Very good, because of course, I'm, I'm not too keen on that, 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. 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, there were rituals taking place in these structures. 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, where all of these carvings, those are narratives, those are stories that meant something to these people.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  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 a lot of modern connotations of what religion is or religion. And of course, that's something we need to sort of get away from because, you know, we're twelve thousand years ago.

• 17:29Tristan Hughes?

  So what should we be imagining with those structures? You said 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 these large buildings that seem to always take up so much of the story of Gobekli Tepe?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  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, eight, 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, you know, ten to twenty metres, 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 and not dry stone walls. They have actually have mortar in between, so look at that.

• 18:22Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  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 at the site. As I said, regular intervals, sometimes at ten, eleven, twelve 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. 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 metres in height. So really. Quite to when you stand next to them and look up is it's it's quite an impressive thing to see.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  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 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 P P N A in date. So sort of end of the 10th millennium B C. And they actually continued into the early P P N B to about mid 9th millennium. So we're looking at sort of, you know, a few hundred years.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  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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• 22:34Tristan Hughes?

  But I love that you can get quite accurate dates from just examining 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 for.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  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 the old wood effect, you know, 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 this clear pattern that corresponds and coincides, you know, correlates rather with the building phases that we can see in the

• 23:29Speaker 03

  building archaeology. So we can actually see that we do have a a long duration that these buildings were in use, a long use life, as we say.

• 23:36Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, that is so extraordinary. I always associate more with with much later constructions. For instance, we've done something.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  It's a mud. It's a sticky mud mixture.

• 23:43Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, well, there we go. Okay, thank you for highlighting that indeed. And and also, just to highlight quickly, you mentioned kind of 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, are they?

• 24:03Speaker 03

  No, I think the local limestone, I mean, it's a limestone plateau where these buildings actually constructed upon. 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 smoothed. So it's very possible that they're quarrying the T pillars from the spot where they were probably more or less erected and put upright. And then the the floor was then smoothed and and, you know, Bob's your uncle, there's your there's your floor and it's very high quality, obviously. Other buildings have plaster floors, which are imitating then these these probably these natural limestone floors. So, you know, these guys knew what they were doing. It was it was a very

• 24:45Speaker 03

  advanced technology. I mean, they we 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.

• 25:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's explore these T pillars a bit more now, Lee, because they are absolutely extraordinary. And I think the the clues in the name and their kind of shape, so kind of a long stem, but the horizontal top part for 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 these kind of sculpture things, how how big are we talking with them, Lee? Are they life size or bigger than life size?

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, I mean, if we're talking about the T pillars, I mean, the tools, 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. So they're very, they're larger than us, you know, larger than human. They are, that's why we sort of speak that monumentality. But of course, you know, monumentality is also relative. I mean, for us, they're not really monumental for for our understanding, you know, if we stand in in a city and there's a skyscraper that's like, you know, dozens of storeys high, that's more monumental for us. Like five, six metres height is not really monumental, but for them, coming from living in an environment where we didn't have any of that sort of, you know,

• 26:14Speaker 03

  metropolis or, you know, what we have today, you know, five and a half metres, six metre high monoliths would have been very much monumental.

• 26:20Tristan Hughes?

  And the monoliths, so that's kind of like monolith or so one stone, is that what the meaning is?

• 26:24Speaker 03

  One piece, yeah, that's right.

• 26:26Tristan Hughes?

  So is the evidence from Gobekli Tepe, is it the earliest dateable evidence we know of for monumentality for the creation of monuments by humans?

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Like I said, it's a perspective thing. I mean, for a hunter gatherer, you know, even if they'd 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, we're UNESCO site since two thousand and eighteen. And of course, that's about monumentality. And 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.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  But, yeah, so it's, we we could say fair, it'd be fair enough to say it's one of the earliest monumental buildings, monumental structures that we know so far.

• 27:24Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  I don't like working with superlatives. I just hate it.

• 27:39Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, for example, Karahan Tepe is one. Gobekli Tepe is the other, and there's another site called Ayhanla, 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 tipiler sites down there. And there are smaller sites as well. And names like Nevallichori would be the Saiborj, Sepetep. So there are numerous now that we have a dozen sites we now know down there in the region. But these three sites, Ayhanla, Gobekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, those are the big central sites, they're the bigger sites. Which have this very long duration from, you know, beginning of the early Holocene, mid 10th millennium B.C. You know, to the PPNB, end of the 9th millennium B.C.

• 28:30Tristan Hughes?

  Are they quite close together? So potentially after more research suggesting whether there was interactions between the settlements?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  There will definitely interaction. I mean, we have the symbolism, the, I mean, there are differences. There's lots of similarities, but there are sort of nuances and differences between, for example, the symbolism. Whereby at Gobekli Tepe you have more animals depicted, at Karahan Tepe there's more of a focus on the human form. So we're seeing, 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, it was definitely there.

• 29:15Tristan Hughes?

  It's all very exciting stuff. I mean, you mentioned how there's a lot of depictions of animals on Gobekli Tepe or at Gobekli Tepe. Is it on these tipilers that you see quite a lot of that animal art?

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course you do 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 reliefs, which you know, a couple of centimetres sort of protruding from the pillar. And then you have high reliefs with like the statues are actually carved from the pillar itself, but still attached to the pillar.

• 29:48Tristan Hughes?

  It's 3D, yeah.

• 29:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, 3D.

• 29:50Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, those are extraordinary. And what kind of animals are being shown?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  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. 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'd say, sort of dangerous animals, also lots of insects, snakes, scorpions. So they're sort of, and this has all been interpreted in various ways in the past, but for example, Klaus Schmidt, the previous excavator, associated it with like

• 30:33Speaker 03

  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. And of course, they're choosing these, leopards are great, you know, and wild boars, I love them.

• 30:55Tristan Hughes?

  It's also interesting. So there are, there are wild animals that are being depicted that they would have seen in the landscape. And 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?

• 31:07Speaker 03

  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 auroch and gonna sort of put it on my pillar now. But no, they come in in different, you know, constellations. And I think we're actually seeing here narratives and that's the most important thing. And this is why, in my opinion, Quebec etape 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, 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 myths of

• 31:50Speaker 03

  hunter gatherer populations before, dating before the Neolithic, before this whole process took off. In that respect, they're so valuable. And I think that's my, that's the reason why the site really deserves its UNESCO status, because it does say, you know, it's so important for humanity, the fact that we have these narratives still preserved.

• 32:09Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think it'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?

• 32:22Speaker 03

  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 the minerals. Because of course, what I didn't mention just now is the fact we found colour, 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. 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.

• 33:02Tristan Hughes?

  And the red colour, do we think from ochre or something else?

• 33:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:05Tristan Hughes?

  From ochre, yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:06Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is, of course, you say there are less human depictions, but the t pillars themselves are depictions of the human form.

• 33:24Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:25Speaker 03

  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 that centre 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 something, they didn't need to depict the face, and they 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 do have, 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, you

• 34:09Speaker 03

  know, 1066 and all that, they've got this sort of nose piece and the eyebrows are very, very clearly formed. And then we have also, the heads are sometimes found quite often separate from the bodies, but I think that's because there's a weak, sort of, 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. And on a lot of occasions, especially on the larger statues, we see them, the hands actually framing the genitals. And so phallae, the phallus is very important to this community. There are lots of penises at Gobekli Tepe.

• 34:52Tristan Hughes?

  What does Gobekli Tepe and Pompeii have in common? There you go. Yeah, 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 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 centres 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?

• 35:27Speaker 03

  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 hunter gatherer, you're more mobile, your groups are smaller. And when you start settling down, your group size increases. So all of a sudden, you know, 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 settentrism, because of the growing population. Whose hunting ground is that? Does it belong to this site or that site? You have like first conflicts coming up perhaps because of surplus accumulation. People are sort of, you know, accumulating wealth or at least materials.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  And of course, that leads to conflict as it always does. So you have these buildings are perhaps places of conflict mitigation, where people come together to mitigate those, those problems. I mean, we have no evidence for the conflict at this time, no evidence for warfare strangely enough. 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 temple.

• 36:42Tristan Hughes?

  But I mean, you know, packed with this incredible art and as it, 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 destruction, it really was a statement and 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 Quebec-L'Attepe or how they treated their dead away from those great buildings?

• 37:12Speaker 03

  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, 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 hierarchisation 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, in the special building so far. I say so far, you know, there's always, you know, always happen. What we do have is quite characteristic for the region itself and for the time. So for the pre-Portrainealistic period in, you know, the eastern parts of the Mediterranean, which is subfloor burial. So it was, we have two burials so far at Quebec-L'Attepe and

• 37:57Speaker 03

  all of them from domestic contexts, because of course, that's something also is quite important for Quebec-L'Attepe, that we've now realised it's not just a ritual site. Because there's like discussions previously, oh, it's just, you know, 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 and beneath the house floors, you frequently get burials in this period. So the, 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

• 38:41Speaker 03

  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 Gabekitepe. We have one which is, I think, a teenager or in her young, early twenties, 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. With particular individuals, we don't know what the criteria were, but they went back to the burial after a while and they exhumed the skull or parts of the body.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  We also have with regard to the skull and the so-called skull cult at Gabekitepe, which is also quite well known from the East Mediterranean at this time. The skulls were exhumed and replastered in the shape with the features. We don't have any plastered skulls at Gabekitepe, 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 and decorated them. And there are also sort of drill holes in them that are perhaps using to suspend them and to hang them, you know.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  You see it sometimes in ethnographical examples, you know, 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 like the skulls coming out at certain times of the year, being hung up in a special building, in the ancestors of some. 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 in the brain, in the skull, that was in the seat of the of the spirit. And of course, the ancestors were the all-knowing. And and and they did that, I think, to to celebrate the ancestors. So ancestor veneration, animism was at the centre of the rituals and the belief systems at this time.

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• 42:05Tristan Hughes?

  I was thinking during your explanation there, Lee, I know it's several thousand years later, but having done stuff in the past on Stone Age Orkney, and you see 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 the status of that family and everyone's involved in the building of it. It's fascinating, like, if there's no similar kind of big burial mounds from Gobekli Tepe in that society, you'd have thought that might be a human nature thing that.

• 42:34Tristan Hughes?

  Someone who we don't know about the society at all, if they saw themselves as more important, would ultimately try and get a big burial for themselves.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny you say that because there are a couple of sites, I mean, excavated quite a few years ago now at Chayon, you 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. 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. We don't know who those individuals were, but interestingly, just recently, in the frame of the new investigations in the Orfa region, at a site called Sepetep, there was also a small room in a building discovered, which was also, which also contained numerous skulls.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  So it does, so the burial traditions were varied, perhaps depending on who you were, your status, your age, your, your place in society. And that's how you mean there was a skull card, but also this, or there was the inhumations, but also this sort of this skull collection point, as it were, in some of the buildings.

• 43:38Tristan Hughes?

  Skull collection point, well, there you go.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Sorry, it's a bit of a strange term to use. Not very archaeological of me, yeah.

• 43:43Tristan Hughes?

  No, 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, I guess, of dwellings at Gobekli Tepe? And if so, what do they look like?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  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 very, in the offset. So in fact, we've got a couple of new, I say new, back in 2017, 18, we had a new, 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 summer, it's very hot and the sun, et cetera. 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 into, in little sondages in several places, right down to the base of the mound.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Sort of 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. So, and we actually found evidence of domesticated or domestic structures, rather dwellings. In these oldest layers, which are very small, sort of round structures. They had no T pillars, but there was a multi-phase, had several floors used, you know, you could see the walking horizons in there. Activity zones with with with hearths and evidence of people chipping and doing napping and. Producing beads from from stone and animal or bird bones, that sort of thing. So.

• 45:21Tristan Hughes?

  All the kind of necklace things that you saw about earlier, the necklaces, right, yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so very, very domestic and that increases over time. And in fact, by the height of the site, in the mid ninth millennium B C, 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 P P N A. In this sort of period from nine thousand six hundred to eight thousand seven hundred. Buildings, whether domestic or special, were usually round or oval. And then at the onset of the P P N B, about eight thousand seven hundred B C. 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 the rectangular comes in and it sort of increases over time as well. That's one way of data. That's what are the differences between the P P N A and the P P N B, the shape of the buildings.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I mean, at the at the time of the P P N B, I think, we were looking at a very much a. A flourishing settlement, very much a village or perhaps even bigger. In fact, you know, 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 higher resolution, 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, we'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.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  They do that for a decade or so. Oh, it's getting a bit nasty. Let's go, you know, or they split into two groups and, you know, that's the way this mound then develops over. In the fifteen hundred years, fifteen hundred years of occupation of the site. So the dating is still, you know. Bit difficult, but if the site, the entire nine, nine and a half hectare site was all being used or, you know, was settled at the same time in the, in the PPNB, then we're looking at a major settlement with, you know, perhaps even a couple of hundred or more people.

• 47:20Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. I mean, I'm, you mentioned hardens there. So I'm guessing those hardens area 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?

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the rubbish dumps, well, say the rubbish pits are very much, you know, important for us.

• 47:43Tristan Hughes?

  An archaeologist's dream is a rubbish dump.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  We just want everyone's rubbish. But of course, you know, we get a good insight into the animals being hunted. Like I said, the gazelle was very important. We have, you know, the horn corals and, you know, we can see actually which parts of the animal being transported to the site from the hunting grounds. In fact, interestingly, we have hunting traps in the, in the vicinity of Quebec, the so-called kites or desert kites, known from Jordan, for example. We have them also in, in Quebec, in the Tash Tepe 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, 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,

• 48:28Speaker 03

  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 not drifting of tangents now.

• 48:37Tristan Hughes?

  That's okay, that's okay.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Of course, you know, water supply was crucial. I mean, it was always thought, you know, Quebec, it had no water supply. People were walking to a, 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 systems. And they're actually, if you remember, or as I said, you know, the, 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 you know, collecting it via channels into these large pits and that being used at the site to to to to as a source of

• 49:21Tristan Hughes?

  Well, kind of thing, wow. I mean, you read my mind. I was going to ask about systems 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. And to me personally, someone who was always fascinated in whether it be sewers or kind of aqueducts or water management, the fact that they had systems there some 10,000 years ago, I mean, that is an astonishing piece of archaeology that is sometimes overlooked compared to like those big special buildings and so on, Lee.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, we haven't got the latrines yet. I'd like to find a

• 49:55Tristan Hughes?

  I was gonna ask about the toilets, okay.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  I haven't got one of those yet, but we're still looking for one of those.

• 50:00Tristan Hughes?

  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 butchering meat or creating clothing or stuff like that? Would they have been the tools that they would have used?

• 50:13Speaker 03

  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 the amount of lithics coming from Quebec, 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 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. And, you know, the assemblage, everything from arrowheads to scrapers to drills, you know, that sort of thing. You know, it's all there. And for that reason, we know it was a, you know, a settlement scenario.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  Apart from that, of course, you know, for the carving of the T pillars, we don't actually have a, you know, a workshop where we can 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. 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.

• 51:15Tristan Hughes?

  It's the kind of hammerstones, kind of thing.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  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. Yeah, and of course I mentioned the basalt, which was not far away, used for the grinding tools. Of course, you had like imports of obsidian, very small amounts of obsidian coming in, less than one percent. And that's coming from different sources from eastern Anatolia. So that also testifies some sort of down the line sort of contact with with groups living further to the north in in the more mountainous regions.

• 51:50Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, Lee, you've painted a wonderful picture of this society, the these people living some 10,000 years ago. And it's an astonishing story that of Gobekli Tepe. And it sounds like there's going to be even more coming out of the ground very, very, very shortly. But you also paint 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 Gobekli Tepe? Why? I mean, does it all fall off a cliff? What do we know?

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have very little evidence for what was going on at Gobekli Tepe after around the end of the ninth millennium B.C. So 8,000 B.C. is what all starts to disappear. And of course, that's a time that we get more and more sites with domesticated species of animals, you know, goats, sheep, that sort of thing. And your crops and of course.

• 52:39Tristan Hughes?

  It's going from wild wheat to domesticated wheat.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  That's right. So I I think that plays a part, the fact that people are now turning away from these hunter gather traditions to this more farming sort of these farming traditions in 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 Gobekli Tepe, these big enclosures or these big special buildings, they also disappear. They don't, you know, we don't have anything sort of comparable until like the late Calcalitic, the Bronze Age, you know, in in in in prehistory. So that's quite remarkable. I think the reason is that it was actually that the farming, of course, the the location of Gobekli Tepe at the moment,

• 53:26Speaker 03

  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 horizon 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, as I say, the belief systems and the social structures change as well along with that. 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-Portuneolithic. And I think it was very much to do with the fact that they didn't really exist. That's we're looking at sort of, you know, inspired individuals, charismatic individuals, which were sort of playing that role, perhaps gifted storytellers

• 54:11Speaker 03

  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 wanted, came away from that. And of course, when subsistence changed, belief system changed, social structures changed, the site became, you know, it was no longer needed in that respect.

• 54:29Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 54:43Speaker 03

  Oh, we've got a lot of work left to do. I mean, the excavations, you know, we've been criticised for saying that it's going to take generations of archaeologists to actually, you know, complete work at Gobekli Tepe. In fact, there's no need to actually, you know, excavate the whole site. 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, our task at hand. And it's going to keep us busy at least till the end of my working life. And I've got quite a few years left yet.

• 55:22Tristan Hughes?

  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 to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 55:30Speaker 03

  Well, thanks again for having me, Tristan. It's been great fun.

• 55:35Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. 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 there in the years ahead. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you want more ancient history videos and clips, then be sure to follow me as well on Instagram at @AncientsTristan. Don't forget that you can also listen to The Ancients and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe

• 56:17Tristan Hughes?

  at historyhit.com/subscribe. Now that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 56:34Speaker 02

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