The Man Who Found Göbekli Tepe, and What He Got Wrong

A history documentary about Göbekli Tepe, the stone enclosures in south-eastern Turkey that are eleven and a half thousand years old, and that a survey in 1963 wrote down as a graveyard and then left alone for thirty-one years. In October 1994 a German archaeologist called Klaus Schmidt reread the survey's note and walked up the hill. His own excavation, at Nevalı Çori, had just gone under the reservoir of the Atatürk Dam, and it had taught him what the slabs poking out of the grass really were: the tops of T-shaped pillars. He dug there for the rest of his life and told the world he had found the first temple, raised by hunter-gatherers before anyone farmed or lived on the hill. First came the temple, he said, and then the city. He died in 2014. His successors have since found houses, hearths, cisterns cut into the rock and thousands of grinding stones, and much of the soil he believed had been heaped into the enclosures on purpose now looks like the work of landslides. At the same time a dozen or so sites of the same culture have turned up across Şanlıurfa province, which makes Göbekli Tepe the best known of a family of places. About a tenth of the mound has been dug. CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction 2:13 I - The Note that Said Cemetery 5:58 II - The Man Who Had Just Lost His Site 9:15 III - What Came Out of the Ground 15:05 IV - First Came the Temple 20:29 V - After 2014 25:54 VI - Not One Hill — SOURCES THE EXCAVATION • German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Tepe Telegrams, the project's own publication: "Göbekli Tepe – The first 20 Years of Research" (2016), "The Site", and the Enclosure D overview. • Klaus Schmidt, Sie bauten die ersten Tempel (C.H. Beck, Munich, 2006). His case, in his own words. • Klaus Schmidt, "The 2003 Campaign at Göbekli Tepe", Neo-Lithics 2003/2. PAPERS • Heun et al., "Site of Einkorn Wheat Domestication Identified by DNA Fingerprinting", Science 278 (1997). • Dietrich, Heun, Notroff, Schmidt and Zarnkow, "The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities", Antiquity 86 (2012). • Gresky et al., "Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult", Science Advances 3 (2017). • Sweatman and Tsikritsis (2017) on Pillar 43, and the excavators' reply, Notroff, Dietrich et al., "More than a vulture" (2017), Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. • Dietrich et al. (2019) on the cisterns and the gazelle hunt; Schönicke (2019) on the grinding stones and the fill; Kinzel and Clare (2020) on the buildings. • Haklay and Gopher, Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2020), on the layout of Enclosures B, C and D. • Eylem Özdoğan, "The Sayburç reliefs: a narrative scene from the Neolithic", Antiquity 96 (2022). — WHERE THE EVIDENCE IS STILL ARGUED OVER • WHO LIVED ON THE HILL. Schmidt said nobody did. The houses, hearths and water supply found since say people did, at least for part of the year. How many, and for how long, is open. • HOW THE ENCLOSURES WERE FILLED. Schmidt thought they were buried deliberately. The current reading is that some of it was intentional and much of it was slope collapse. The film gives this as the present view, not the last word. • BEER. The big stone vessels hold calcium oxalate, which forms when grain is brewed, and also when grain simply sits in water. Nobody can yet say which. • HOW MUCH IS STILL BURIED. Schmidt read the 2003 geophysics as sixteen more enclosures and nearly two hundred pillars. The project now says more than ten large buildings. • PILLAR 43 AS A RECORD OF A COMET. Argued in print in 2017, and rejected by the excavators the same year. The film gives both. • WHAT THE ENCLOSURES WERE FOR, and what the stones with holes through them were. Nobody knows, and the film says so. — A NOTE ON THE PICTURES Klaus Schmidt is drawn from photographs of him on site, as a consistent likeness. No photograph of Peter Benedict, who led the 1963 survey, turned up anywhere, so his face is invented; the carved objects, on the other hand, are drawn from photographs of the real ones. Scenes of Neolithic life illustrate current interpretations and are not records. The maps are drawn from real geographic data, and the enclosure plan is to scale from published wall measurements. #GobekliTepe #Archaeology #Neolithic #Prehistory #AncientHistory #History