Message #149198

[Bianca]

Schmidt expects to find burials beneath the benches, much like those at Çatal Höyük, 120 kilometers (75 mi) to the west. He’s been cautious about digging so far, however. “As soon as you do that, you destroy a structure,” he says. The first look will probably come in this spring. Burials are a feature Ian Hodder, director of the Çatal Höyük project, would like to see, too. “It’s certainly possible they have burials,” says the Stanford University professor. “From my point of view, it would be nice if there were ancestral burial places because I think that’s what fits into what we’re finding at Çatal Höyük.” There, scores of burials have been found beneath benches in long-buried houses.

Most of the stones at Göbekli Tepe present hunting scenes. As with the “creation” scene, one stands out. Crunching over the ever-present flints, Schmidt shows me the “poison”-themed pillar. Several snakes, aligned with the **** of what looks like a fox, are wrapping themselves around the monolith; spiders crawl; and what Schmidt interprets as a poisonous centipede—the 42-legged version found in this part of Turkey—frames the scene.

What was going on here? Animal images from the Neolithic period frequently correlate with early religion, researchers say. “In tiered, shamanistic cosmologies, wild animals frequently come from god or a Lord of the Animals,” write David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce in Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of Gods. “Hunting is therefore more than meat-acquisition …. It entails interaction with and acquisition of supernatural potency….”

Hunting and potency are seen as an underlying theme of the Göbekli Tepe images by other prominent Neolithic scholars. Hodder interprets the imagery as symbolizing danger, wild animals and male sexuality. “It’s a very sort of male/sexual/wild animal type of world,” he says. He links it with Çatal Höyük “in the sense that there may well be rituals in which male prowess was associated with killing wild animals and giving feasts. Social status was built in that way.”

And it was rituals and feasting that led to the first temple-building and crop domestication—not viceversa—argues another leading prehistorian. Brian Hayden, professor of archeology at Simon Fraser University in Canada, describes such feasting as “economically based competition,” which he says was a fundamental characteristic of all complex hunter-gatherer societies. Once established, “an entire array of prestige technologies develop to display the successful production and deployment of surpluses,” Hayden writes. “These include megaliths and massive architecture.” He argues that competitive feasting provided the conditions that required the investment of extra energy in the production of special foods. “Feasts were opportunities to vaunt one’s successes and were predicated on surpluses,” Hayden says.

This one-upmanship extended to hunting, Hayden adds. He thinks hunter-gatherers of the Upper Paleolithic (the period that immediately preceded the Neolithic) may have especially relished the meat of difficult-to-obtain wild cattle, either for its taste or its spiritual powers. Schmidt wouldn’t argue with that: He tells me the most prevalent bone remains found in the Göbekli Tepe fill are those of aurochs, an extinct species of ox and the progenitor of domesticated cattle. “Of all the species we’ve identified, aurochs are the only ones that required a communal effort to hunt—they needed the most complex techniques,” Schmidt says.

As for plants, Hayden contends that it’s not a big step from gathering to tending and selecting plants for desirable feasting properties. Of course, agricultural food production was much more labor-intensive than obtaining it from the wild. Since agriculture required clearing and spading ground, weeding, protection, harvesting and storing seed, the earliest domesticated plants were probably not used for everyday meals but reserved for special occasions like feasting.

From the mound’s windy top, Schmidt shows me what’s just on the other side to the north. There are more megaliths buried here, as yet untouched. The archeologist figures the entire site covers up to 36 hectares (90 acres), of which he’s dug just five percent. On this side, farmer Yıldız has already planted new fig and mulberry trees in two low-lying areas. Schmidt tells me that ground-penetrating radar and ground-resistivity tests in these bowls have revealed up to 20 more buried circles. But their excavation is some time off. “We still need another 10 years on what we’ve already found,” he says with a sigh.

Could even complex hunter-gatherer societies have organized the manpower to erect such a vast array of temple stones? “You don’t necessarily need a very large concentration of people to put these things up,” argues Andrew Moore, dean of graduate studies at Rochester Institute of Technology and an eminent prehistoric archeologist. He led excavations at the massive Neolithic site Abu Hureyra in northern Syria. “You can either have a lot of people working for a short period of time or relatively few people for a long period of time. That goes for other large projects as well, such as Stonehenge, the Pyramids or the Easter Island statues.”

Even so, Moore thinks it inconceivable that a megalithic site like Göbekli Tepe could have been built purely by hunter-gatherers. “It’s much more likely that they were also doing some grain-growing and stock-raising,” says Moore, who has dated grains of domesticated rye back 13,000 years at Abu Hureyra. “I imagine that there are settlements yet to be found in the [Göbekli Tepe] region within comfortable walking distance. Sites like this require some sort of base relatively nearby.”