GÖBEKLI TEPE REVEALED: What we know in 2022 | Dr. Lee Clare

hi there welcome to another pre-history guys interview where we have the chance to introduce you to archaeologists and historians involved in groundbreaking work around the globe today we're talking with archaeologist dr lee clare coordinator of research for quebec tepe one of the most enigmatic ancient sites in the world yeah in 2015 dr clare took on the position of research coordinator of the dfg long-term project at quebec tepe and in 2019 moved to the dai's istanbul department where he is now acting consultant for prehistoric archaeology now we got the impression i think didn't we rupert that does how can we put this um quite a lot of misinformation uh out there about uh huge amount yes yeah and um yeah our knowledge wasn't that hot so we thought we'd go straight to the source and uh talk to the man who can give us the very latest on the excavations and current interpretations of what many people see as the oldest megalithic site in the world dr lee claire welcome to the show and thanks so much for agreeing to join us we're uh yeah we're really looking forward to this one you're in istanbul aren't you i'm in istanbul yeah what's the weather like over there looking out the window a bit blowy um but not as blue as it has been the past couple of days or yesterday in fact was a bit of a storm going on but i'm quite safe here in my little apartment [Laughter] surviving over there well listen lee first things first uh we always like to ask people what was it that brought you into archaeology in the first place and particularly with you and then how did all that eventually take you to be involved with quebec tepe you know it's quite quite a leap it's a long story i suppose i mean i i think i think the easiest art or the basic answer would be that uh as a child i was always interested in history and at the time like most young boys it was dinosaurs and then it progressed from there and i i realized that humans were were totally much more interesting than dinosaurs at some point and and then yeah i mean history um was always something that i enjoyed doing at school and then after that it sort of i decided and said to do languages because i wanted to get out i wanted to go somewhere else in the world so i did german and french at university in london and uh ended up in cologne where i stopped and did my archaeology studies there so i was combining both my language and my getting out of the uk with the uh added advantage of studying archaeology as well that's how it happened in istanbul that was part of the i'm editing my uh masters and my phd in in kern in cologne and then after completing my phd i got a position with uh claus schmidt on the excavation project at gabetty tepe right um he unfortunately passed away as you know in 2014 and since then i've been heading the uh research project um at quebec tepe so you know these things sort of happen fantastic right place right time i guess well yeah yeah yeah oh no that's uh brilliant i mean did you have any was it an ambition was it an ambition to get to quebec was it on your horizon when i was doing my masters in in cologne i was very much looking at a central european right so the linear pottery how did my master's on linear plots and i was quite enamored with that and i was enjoying myself but then for the phd it sort of changed direction again and i was looking at climate change the so-called 8.2 event um in the eastern mediterranean and that sort of brought into contact with turkey and the east mediterranean you know the near east and then uh this position came up with klaus schmidt which i applied for and lo and behold uh here i am so it's uh uh quite different obviously to the neolithic that we have in in uh central europe to that that we have here in in turkey especially in southeastern turkey of course yes yeah yeah so that's uh that's a bit of background about uh about lee i think uh before we kick off you know about you know getting into the nitty-gritty about uh gobekli tepe um itself and the recent developments and the archaeology there but a bit of background about i don't know quebeco tepa is a as a institution because quite a lot has been happening over the past years 25 years in indeed you know you've got places like stonehenge and machu picchu you know because of their global uh reach there's an institutionalization that occurs and i think there's a bit of a story that you can tell about uh quebec lieutenant yeah i mean the site itself i mean if you think about other big archaeological sites uh especially classical ones you know they they have research going back over 100 years you know and of course with quebec everything started back in the mid 1990s so you know just over 25 years ago um so it's um yeah it's been sort of a like a very quick development uh you could say because of course in 2018 we've got the unesco uh status the inscription and uh since then things have taken up but even before then of course it was very uh yeah present in the in the media um you know i think we'll probably go into the the thing about the world's first temples etc a bit later on but um you know it's been a very uh high-speed sort of you know from this first discovery the first discovery was actually 1960s uh in the frame of a research or a survey project in the region by uh the oriental institute in chicago and the university of istanbul at the time and after that after the initial discovery it was more or less say not forgotten but it was you know published but it wasn't until the mid-1990s that excavations actually started there so um you can actually say you know the rediscovery of quebec type in the 1990s marks the beginning of this sort of present phase and as i say within that 25 years um we've gone from you know initial excavations to a fully uh you know developed unesco world heritage site so a very fast process in fact i mean the not least of which has been the development of the visitor center i have to admit you know in my imagination uh up until quite recently uh gabe ledepa was a you know was an archaeological site you know exposed up in the the hills remote from uh from anywhere but now you've got a full-blown and uh quite wonderful looking uh visitors that's how it was in fact it was i mean the first excavation seasons in fact there was no excavation house and you know klaus schmidt and his team are actually camping um at the site and of course the roads that now exist were not non-existent although it was sort of simple mud paths um and of course since then you know we've now got as you said the visitor center we have shuttle buses we have a shop a ticket office the main road is all well connected and it's attracting uh thousands of people every year so i mean this is of course it has increased significantly since 2018 an inscription on unesco that's obviously a part of that but it's also of course uh you know being uh advertised quite a quite a bit i mean if you're flying to istanbul airport um even until quite recently there was a big sort of one-to-one copy i'd say copy um sort of a representation of of of uh some of the pillars from quebec de tepa and and actually reconstructed or built um at the uh i think it was at the uh terminal the international terminal at the new istanbul airport so i mean there's a lot of publicity out there as well um and you only have to go do an internet search to find all sorts of uh things about the site some of which are a bit hair-raising but um you know this is part of the parcel well it's a funny thing isn't it because at most internationally important sites all the archaeology has been completed but your work at competitive is just it's ongoing with new discoveries being made all the time so how do you reconcile the you know the conflicts between carrying on with excavations whilst you've got hordes of tourists coming to visit throughout the year yeah i mean um obviously it's not always that easy i mean it depends on the tourists of course um you may may know we have a new or two new um big protective shelters which were constructed at the site as part of the application for unesco world heritage that was all part of that process and one of those the main one of course where the the main sort of site is the main excavation area the public can actually sort of walk around the whole excavation area and sort of look in look over our shoulders as it were the work we're doing and of course you know everyone wants to sort of meet and greet uh the archaeologist so it does get a little sort of you know on some days you know but uh we try and uh you know keep them informed and be as nice as we can even if we are in a bit of a rush um but of course you do get some guests sort of um asking us politely to move out of the way because i want to take a photo when i do but i think the best thing is that we do have positive feedback on that i think it's very good um you know for the public to see us at work this sort of public public archaeology and they feel you know they're seeing uh state of the art excavations and what's going on at the site and to be involved in that and i think that's part of the experience they have when they visit us yeah but a bit of trivia there was a turkish television series or was um called what is it actually and uh that's caused a bit of a yeah i mean [Music] i've watched the series as well i mean i found it quite amusing um but of course there's a lot of fiction in there there's a lot of stuff in there that just doesn't you know the site was used for filming um yeah but we do get then uh tourists coming up on visitors asking you where is this scene where was it set where's the cave where's this where's that story you know this this doesn't exist us or whatever it's it's all um pretty unspectacular in that in that sense it's not particularly hollywood um but of course it's a very impressive site uh in archaeological terms as well yeah yeah like a sort of uh highlander made the clavicans famous yeah that's true yeah anyway let's get on to a bit more as specific stuff um i think what is missing you know was certainly missing from my perception i think missing from a lot of people's perception is the broader context that quebec liteve sits in not only in space but also in in time could you i know it's a tall order but uh give a bit of a background a bit you know the story the context in which quebec typically sits in terms of you know the tigris euphrates the fertile crescent and what was going on during uh this uh period you know quite simply i mean this whole process of militarization it's something that evolved over a very long period of time it didn't sort of uh it's not this sort of revolution that you often hear about that it happened more or less overnight it's a long drawn-out process reaching right back into the into the paleolithic and leading you know one thousand two thousand three thousand years until we actually have this sort of fully evolved neolithic sort of communities uh which then sort of uh dispersed as it were um uh and of course governor tepe has often been seen uh as the smoking gun of this process you know that that the becky tepe was that trigger that caused this and of course that's quite difficult to uh prove or it's not it's not facts you know this is because of course sedentary sedentarism you know people becoming staying in one place um cultivating wild crops etcetera that's something that started right back in the epipalatic at the end of the paleolithic and uh something you know which wasn't a linear development but it was more like you know up and down you know um and we even see that still at the time of kubectepper that there were some sites that had domesticated animals and crops and others that didn't and of course this whole process is just not as simple as perhaps the language or the terminology makes it out to be so a very long drawn process drawn out process and of course quebec tepa sits more or less at a very key moment in that process you know at the beginning of the holocene climate demolition um coming out of the younger dryas and of course um you know for this reason and especially with the connection to religion and the first temples that i've just mentioned um it brought about a bit of a it wasn't a controversy but it was it was certainly something that people looked at when it happened especially academics saying hang on a minute and clark schmidt uh looking back back at work by corval for example saying you know uh it wasn't you know religion came first and it actually triggered the domestication for example the building of these buildings these monumental buildings these temples made people become more reliant on on supply of food victims and uh for this reason it led to domestication so the instead of you know the more religion triggered domestication of course that's a big sort of hypothesis and um uh that's something we've been looking at in more detail just recently so um you had to put it in a nutshell of course a long drawn-out process go back to tepa a very crucial stage in this process but not the trigger um that some people or or it's often laid out to be yeah yeah because i find it intere fascinating um this idea of sedentism you know of being settled and at the same time um existing uh persisting within a kind of hunter-gatherer [Music] method of subsistence um i and the fact that you said that it's uh up and down it's not clear-cut um but you wonder how uh you know large settlements like this can subsist you know with that mechanism where are they going out to to how far are they reaching out to uh to hunt and yeah i mean does not necessarily mean that you're totally sedentary you are still very mobile in in the landscape of course for hunting for gathering purposes and i think that's a bit of a misconception when you say sedentary century doesn't mean 100 sedentary but of course there's a very high level of mobility in there well do you think there's something particular about the area then that uh had uh sedentism um arise um something particular in the characteristics of the landscape the climate at the time or uh what what have you that uh had sedentism take hold um i mean with sedentism i mean obviously i think the um the economy plays a very big part in in how you in how mobile you are and of course if you are relying on on on stands of wild crops um or on certain animals um then perhaps you do become more sedentary in that respect to to keep hold of those resources um but uh you know i think with with the looking at go back to tepe i i think obviously the climate variation amelioration at the beginning of the holocene uh did cause reforestation it did bring a new species um and of course you have to think i mean the main uh animal they were hunting there was gazelle and of course the gazelle were migrating and you know they're following the migratory paths of these animals and of course you know um that's something we have to consider as well so i think the resources and the the economy are certainly very big uh uh factors in in uh becoming sedentary um uh and for that reason i mean it can happen i mean of course even in the upper paleolithic in in central europe we have a sort of sedentism um in in uh gunnersdorf in in central you know europe and it's it's um it can happen i mean there are certainly hunter-gatherer societies which can be sedentary or more or less identity of course with with varying degrees of mobility um but yeah i think obviously the natural surroundings the landscape um the resources are an important important factor in that um the social aspect of course is another thing i mean this is something and of course when you start building large structures like tepe it would imply that there is a certain degree of connection uh to a landscape and to staying within that landscape um marking boundaries et cetera so rising territoriality um so i haven't really got an answer to your question but i can see you know from what i know in in the region as you know as mark markers for for that indicators no but i mean that's a that's fantastic because there were several points came up within that that i hadn't realized uh before um you know hunting of the gazelle of course it makes sense now but enough there are actually hunting traps um so-called kites uh in the vicinity of godzilla and the other t-pillar sites in the region which uh you perhaps already know from other parts of the near east but actually we do have them in in the shannon warfare region in southeastern turkey although the dating hasn't been confirmed yet but it would appear that they they might be um uh contemporary with uh with these t-pillar uh illinois sites right okay it is fascinating well well many of the discoveries that you've been making over the last few years have completely overturned some of the earlier assumptions i mean just mentioning some there but so i mean for example just to you know toss out a list of these questionable things that have arisen over the years so there's there's the zero point in time idea that gobekli tepe was the origin of everything um uh it was said that there wouldn't originally it was said that there were no domestic buildings that people couldn't live there because there was no water uh that it was deliberately backfilled and covered over and that there was evidence of feasting there but that's all these things have been disproved in one way or another haven't they so so so we're in this situation of what do we actually know now if that's not just an enormous question to law but you're in that way i mean i wouldn't say all these points have been disproved i think we've been looking again at the evidence that we've had from earlier excavations and in the course of the uh construction of these new protective shelters at the site we've been doing um we did a number of uh deep soundings um right through of course you can't sort of um sort of anchor your big shelter without actually drilling into the into the underlying bedrock and of course you cannot drill through archaeology so in the course of the past actually cloud schmidt started these works quite a few years back and we continued them after he passed away uh up to the construction of these shelters and it involved actually in small areas removing all of the the deposits archaeological deposits from these soundings and in the course of which we got glimpses into lower parts or the lowest levels of of the of the mount of the artificial mound uh the domestic or the archaeological accumulations and deposits and it was here that we actually did find for the first time very good evidence for domestic activity and of course previously to this there had been some speculation or doubt as it were that that there was not a domestic a clear domestic component to the site that it was mainly a ritual site um a sacred site uh that was visited by groups in the area at certain times of the year now these this new evidence we've got now from these deep soundings i mean we've got very good um features of dwellings of activity zones of flint knapping um hearths i mean the thing was there was never a clear fireplace or a half discovered really until rece until these deep soundings um and this was one of the reasons that klaus schmidt always said that it appears that this site was actually more of a ritual site than a domestic site and you mentioned also the water i mean the water he was also aware that there are systems um in the surrounding landscape on the plateau um because there's no within the direct vicinity of the site there's no flowing water there's no um river uh the nearest being about two or so kilometers two or three kilometers away um down the slope um so um these systems were and there were also sort of channels carved into the plateau actually diverting or draining the runoff the water rainwater runoff into these systems and collecting the water um and of course in the early holocene um there was increased more precipitation i think than today it would have been a you know wetter than today and of course that would have speak also in favor of this water harvesting um but anyway we're coming off the track off off the track of the question now but um there's there's this of course there's um uh and uh we also have a burial uh for a long time burials was were looked for but were never found and of course burials are also an indication that people are are are staying in one place and burying their their dead there uh especially in the in the in the pre-portunity it's quite common that you have sub-floor burials so more or less they open up the your cellar when you when your relative dies um then you open up the floor of the of the of the room and you stick this person in so you know granny passes away and you go down to the you know down there and open up a hole and put her in and she's with you for eternity um which i find it quite sounds a bit weird but it's quite a nice thought in a way um so we've had a burial come out during the course of these uh soundings which was very nice it was between two ppnb floors in the ppme building which is also an indication that these buildings were domestic in a way there are large numbers of grinding stones the the lithics has now been looked at again or large-scale uh analyses of lithics within the frame of a phd dissertation or two in fact ongoing um which are also showing that the the lithics and the the flint tools uh the site are very clearly domestic in function so a very typical domestic sort of uh repertoire of tools so um this all speaks in favor of of people actually living uh the site and i think in the ppna in the earliest part of the site so i mean just going back to chronology i mean the site begins pna is pre-pottery which starts around the mid 10th millennium bc so about 9500 600 bc and goes about 8700 bc and then we have the early ppnb which starts at 8700 bc to about 8200 bc and i think in the ppna so in the outgoing 10th millennium earliest early 9th million in bc we're seeing at least uh some uh at least domestic buildings at the site whether they were totally sedentary at this time it's hard to say you know okay analysis are ongoing but i think it's it's quite a good chance of that but by the ppnb by the early ppmb by about the mid 9th million bc i think we're looking at quite a significant uh settlement in fact um with you know uh rectangular buildings one of the new or one of the new things of the early ppmb compared to ppna is that in the ppn you have more or less round buildings and then the ppnb uh they invent the corner and and uh buildings become rectangular slowly but not yeah only rectangle you have round buildings as well but um uh and then we have these rectangular buildings with subterrane subfloor burials um uh everything points this domestic activity so we're moving away from this sort of previous paradigm of the site being um a ritual site a purely ritual site to one with a domestic component a clear domestic component which is focused on these special buildings um so that's that in a you know as i would uh sort of in many ways i think um people might perceive this conversation as kind of back to front because we've sort of landed you know in the in the domestic area of gobekli tepe and you know not talked up front about everybody's image of gobekli tepe and that is the t pillars in the main buildings um call people this is this is the springboard for the idea of quebec as a temple uh as uh point zero it's this monumental aspect of the main buildings how many say a bit about how many there are and and you know their concentration in the middle and the the time span that uh okay zero point in time business i mean this is something that the site this is the um official title of the site as it were in the media um and if you go to the vista center that's what it says there and it's always also been referred to as ground zero which i find a bit ominous right but uh as i've you know explained i mean it's not a zero point in time really i mean this whole development there were special buildings before quebec you know pp a sites and epipolitic sites i mean this is something that isn't new what is new at gabetty tepper is this monumentality that that's the size of it the fact is it's it's these big t pillars um up to five and a half meters in height um the uh engraved or the say that the reliefs and the the um uh highway left low reliefs the engravings and the symbolism that we have at the site and this is actually the reason why it's a unesco world heritage site is the fact that we have this wonderful site um with these this breathtaking architecture which is really quite new um what was new at the time of course we have further sites now um uh so that that's an important point but where were we going with this um the question was sorry uh yes it does i mean so but we we've got what uh buildings how many are there yeah we have quite a few of these so-called special buildings um uh several in fact uh we've labeled them alphabetically this is something that cloud schmidt began um with building a um at the beginning and we're now up to building h this is the last building that was discovered uh i don't know just before klaus uh passed away or a few years before that um it's in the northwestern part of the site but uh yeah these buildings um we'll come to the temple description in a minute i'll just describe first of all these buildings i mean they're obviously very special they're special buildings i refer to them as special buildings or structures to get away from this temple business um they're characterized more or less by a round oval shape um and in the walls of these uh or in set into the walls of this these buildings are a dozen or so pillars it varies in number um which are up to about three and a half meters in height and towards the middle of the buildings freestand there are two freestanding pillars of up to five and a half metres in height now i think the best example is then building d which is uh not totally excavated but it's getting there we did some more work on that this year and and uh uncovered a bit of the area in the center that hadn't been uncovered previously and you know they have a diameter you know 10 12 up to 20 25 30 meters varies of course from building to building each building should obviously be seen individually um the carvings on the pillars are very much oriented towards like the a lot of wild animals obviously you can expect there are no domesticated animals they're all wild animals um very often uh things like foxes snakes or rocks wild boar these are all vultures these are all very common motifs um on on the uh on these pillars so um if we go into the interpretation now i would move away as i said from this sort of temple interpretation or this term temple for me it's it just sort of is it's too tight it's it's it's not giving us the the possibility of exploring other functions of these buildings in fact um because of course if you say temple uh the first thing you think of is a church or a synagogue or a mosque and we're sort of imposing our own sort of modern concept of temple onto these buildings and i think it's more than that i think we have to you know we can't just say that uh you know back in you know 10 000 years ago people were going to one particular building to practice rituals and to worship i'm not questioning the fact that there was a religion i'm not questioning the question in the fact that there were rituals but i think to narrow it down to such a very fine sort of interpretation of these buildings by using this term is is limiting us uh so much and i think uh the buildings deserve much more discussion as to their actual functions the other conceptual aspect that we see in the in the monumentalism there we see photographs and the t structures uh open to the skies you know and and occurring as freestanding and of course the connection is immediately made to places like uh stonehenge and i think that is probably one of the big mistakes yeah i mean you just said that the the surrounding t pillars are set into the walls and they're not necessarily freestanding uh items at all in the same way that uh exactly i mean uh with regarding sort of uh regarding sort of comparisons with other sites like stonehenge like malta et cetera i mean there's a big chronological gap between them and a geographical gap between them a lot of people um i don't know perhaps uh ignore but of course we can't do that and um you know these i i've got my little t-pillar here my little prop all right i mean um uh i think everyone's aware that uh these t-shaped pillars are more than just uh for holding up the roof um and they were not open to the elements at least not the whole time um i mean we have to imagine that these buildings were long-lived buildings in fact um they had many different phases they were recycling the material used in the building so what we're actually seeing the excavation trenches when you look into them you're not seeing the the building as it was at the time but you're seeing all those different phases uncovered which would not have been visible originally at the time when quebec tepper was obviously in use now these buildings our recent sort of excavations and research has shown we have got new radio carbon data for example um have shown that these buildings were actually in use for perhaps even up to several centuries so and of course there's a lot of things that can be moved and replaced and chipped away um over that time so it's very difficult to say how a building actually looked for example in the earliest of its phases um easier is of course how it looked in its latest phase um so these are all things we have to take into consideration so not only has the um our understanding of the buildings change because of this new chronology but of course also the the stratigraphy of the site needs to be reassessed and of course now we're seeing whereas klaus schmidt previously said there was first the ppna with the round buildings and the monumental buildings and then in the ppnb the rectangular buildings no these ppna buildings actually continued in their later phases into the ppnb and they were still being uh up kept and used even in this time so uh and rebuilt and rebuilt pillars replaced or dragged from one place to another and reused turned around you know for example in building a there's a t-pillar a so-called central t-pillar which appears to be facing the wrong way um so we have to think of things like earthquakes etc that may have happened that caused damage it had to be repaired um so there are very many things that you know were happening to these these buildings were were evolving the whole time and they were never actually finished um so that's something we must consider uh very closely when we're thinking about interpretation am i right in thinking that um there are smaller t pillars in some of the smaller rooms that's the only way you know smaller buildings and more sort of um buildings that could have been interpreted as more domestic in in nature i i think what we're seeing here and it is quite quite interesting i mean uh we have these round buildings the big main monumental buildings with these large t-pillars and then in the ppmb in the domestic in in the smaller buildings which are now rectangular which i think were more or less domestic um we see them as well and of course they're much smaller um and i think what we're seeing here i mean i i should also add that these t-pillars are probably used for a sort of um architectural purposes for supporting a roof um the big buildings were also probably roofed over with entrance through the roof through so-called portal stones that you went through down in a ladder and it's also applied to the later rectangular ppnb buildings we have good evidence that you know they're mainly entered through the roof and not through the ground level and we don't have very much evidence for doors so or you know doors on the surface um so and i think you know what we're seeing here and i think we see this a lot later on in later neolithic sites like chateau huyuk is we're seeing this move move of the ritual component from the big monumental buildings into the domestic buildings so um okay as you probably know i mean at the end of quebec these big monumental buildings disappear we don't have them anywhere else that's it they're over and a lot of the domestic a lot of the ritual activity is actually taking place within the domestic buildings and i think we're seeing this shift already at quebec tepe in these early ppnb buildings where they're actually incorporating these t pillars into the domestic architecture yeah so we we know that the upright pillars uh represent human forms because they've got arms carved down the sides but so what what is the rationale that uh you know clearly they had the artistic skills to carve really quite sophisticated representations of animals or whatever what is the thinking behind why uh why do they just have block you know these t-shaped pillars why do they not have heads what was i thinking my simple answer is they didn't want them and they could do them but they didn't want them and we have wonderful examples of sort of if you think of the uh so-called channel of a man or from that was found in in building work at uh in in the center of shannon uh which is the main city in the area um i mean this is from the pnb and it is it's wonderful facial facial features and from other sites now where excavations are taking place for example at callaghan tepa we have wonderful depictions of the human face so yeah they could do it but they obviously didn't want to and of course the question is why didn't they want to now obviously um now our thinking at the moment as to the identities of these t pillars because each one i think would have been identifiable to the people at the time they either represented individuals or groups of individuals where a face was not you know it didn't make sense to actually portray an actual face um or they were mythological in a way that they it's hard for us to actually pinpoint it but it wasn't wanted but i think the most important thing is is the other the reliefs that are on these pillars for example on this one here this is one of the pillars from the central um part of or the freestanding pillars in building d um you can see here the arm coming down and the elbow and here's the belt and on the front here you've got the belt buckle the loin cloth a little bit of a necklace going on here and this one under his arm is actually carrying a fox so what we're seeing here is a narrative they're actually telling us these are the people that were using these buildings actively knew who was being represented by these t pillars um it's very much i've given this example before in some talks of mine and i quite like it you know if you think about our sort of nursery sort of you know fairy tales like i don't know little red riding hood and the fox if we went to a pillar and we saw a little girl with a red cape and a wolf a wolf sorry then we'd know that little red riding hood would associate that story that narrative with our culture as it were and i think there was no difference to the people at the time they knew exactly who was being depicted and represented by these uh pillars and there was no need to have a face on on these things um that would be my answer to that question um and i think this whole narrative thing is extremely interesting i mean if you look at the different i mean this was a good example with the with a guy carrying the fox um you have others where we have different uh sort of we have depictions of the wild boar which is combined with perhaps the snake or you know all the certain birds vultures etc i mean uh obviously these are narratives these are stories that the people knew they're not just um pictures of the animals they were seeing every day in in nature or every other day i don't know how often they saw these animals but you know they're they're they're telling a narrative in that combination and i think these combinations are important to look at in order to get us sort of an insight into what's going on in the minds of of these people and i think uh this is what actually makes governor tepe so special is what we're seeing here is this sort of we're getting a glimpse into the world view of these people that were living 10 000 11 000 years ago and these were the stories the narratives the myths which were important to them which were so important that they carved them on stone and actually put them up in these uh magnificent buildings that's a lovely perspective it is fantastic indeed tell me there's one of the um you know pillars of the uh if that's not too much of a pun sorry of the uh go back to tafe as as temple as um a ritual site that people kept coming back to uh was the idea that it had been backfilled in one great uh sort of end end of cycle uh feasting event where the thing was decommissioned um but recent excavations have put a bit of a damper on that idea yeah i mean recent research looking at these uh special buildings has uh you know given us a wealth of new information we've not only been looking at the earlier recordings from the earlier excavations but doing our own analyses and research building archaeological research radio carbon dates etc of these monuments and you know we can now firmly say that they were multi-phase we have a very long chronology of these buildings uh perhaps up to several centuries um and it was always i say always but it was it was a focus of earlier works uh to emphasize that these buildings were richly buried after the end of their use likes um and we're now seeing evidence for other possible interpretations um certainly we cannot rule out that the buildings weren't to a certain extent intentionally backfilled but whether that happened in a ritual context is different difficult to say uh what we're seeing more at the moment is evidence for uh pressure from the surrounding slopes because these buildings were actually situated located or are still in a bit of a hollow surrounded by then flanked on three sides by these by these rectangular buildings are higher lying on the slopes and of course we have the problem with with gravity and the fact we have it even now in our excavation trenches that there's a lot of pressure on on these slopes uh and in the past um there were probably slope slides which led to the inundation of these buildings by uh structures on on the surrounding slopes so this is one of the new sort of hypotheses that's coming out of our new work but of course we can't just say it was this it was that each building has looked at you know individually um but at least for building d and probably for building c there is very good evidence that there was inundation from slope slides and there was actually repair going on to the to the special buildings as an answer to this sort of pressure um that was emanating from the slopes um and none more so the natural architecture itself uh the fact that these buildings uh the different phases of the buildings and they got smaller increasingly smaller over time and one the new building was always built inside the old building that's why you have this sort of um russian doll sort of uh situation going on where you know the the outer or the larger building was the older phase they built within that one and then they built within that one and that's also an answer perhaps to sort of coming to terms or at least mitigating the slope pressure that's coming from from um the the surrounding slope that's astonishing do you have any sense of a timeline for or a chronology for you know how frequently did they uh did they do a rebuild uh in the russian doll sense yeah i i think you know this is something we're working on now we have radio carbon data um but we don't have radio comp data from all of the phases um and i think until we have more data we can't actually go into the actual precise sort of chronology and even then it's difficult because of course you know we have to have good reliable uh dates um yeah and uh the preservation of botanical remains is is not so good at the site i mean we're lucky enough to have bits of charcoal that we can actually date but of course charcoal you always have the problem of old wood etc etc but always a bit of a question mark with regards to that and of course also the added uh problem that a lot of the charcoals at the site have been mixed up and you know when they're making them water perhaps a bit of this like all gets mixed in so there's a lot of movement there but the trend that we're seeing in the radiocarbon data even though they are made on charcoal is that we have a clear longevity of these special buildings from the ppna period in to the ppmb and most of these dates are actually coming from the early ppnb so the last phases of these buildings was definitely contemporary or contemporaneous with rectangular structures on the side of the slopes so um and of course the the contents the what we actually excavate from these special buildings to actually unearth them um it's just lots of rubble it's animal bow lots of animal bone lots of flint tools and all of this was probably coming from um you know uh the the structures on the on the mound uh that slipped down um uh i mean a bit of the occasional bit of human bone could be disturbed burials or skull caches that sort of thing we have a lot of skull fragments coming or say a lot some so is it true that you know some of that debris that had been coming down uh animal bone in particular that had been previously interpreted as the remains of a feasting event that's right i mean previously um it was interpreted that these these ritual burial processes were accompanied by big feasts where people got together for the manpower woman power um and to actually fill up these these buildings um but if you imagine that they were also within a settlement it's very difficult to get that material to them in the first place central part of the settlement um and i i think the best sort of idea we've heard so we've had so far is that this animal bone is actually coming from from refuge pits refuse pits um that have been sort of disturbed and they've slipped down the slope yeah yeah just a side thing um am i right in thinking you had a little bit of a a revelation because some dating became available from uh human bone that had been found in one of the systems um yeah uh it wasn't actually dated up the hill right i mean this was regarding the the um the systems about the water um uh harvesting as you might call it rainwater harvesting um we were never sure whether this was actually contemporaneous with the actual archaeological site because of course there's a lot of activity going on missing that was the the the the bone had been discovered in the 90s and then gone yeah i think yeah yeah what happened was the colleague was looking for botanical remains and went into one of these systems um instead of getting his botanical remains there were lots of bones uh which turned out to which then went back to berlin and which we recently had analyzed and looked at and it turns out that these bones were actually human bones and they were probably actually and now they show scratch marks very typical for the ppn period for the treatment of bones uh in a secondary sort of burial context and it turns out that there are numerous individuals the long bones of numerous individuals interred in this uh system uh which would then give us a date really that these systems were used in the ppn for a secondary burial so they must be at least ppn in date which is fantastic for us because then we have the proof now that there actually were harvesting the water uh in the ppm uh period yeah brilliant we did mention it before and that is the lithics but i don't think people quite appreciate how much stonework that you've uh [Laughter] uh is lithics and even the site i mean um compared to a a normal i think normal site in in in other areas you know you you get very excited if you find an arrowhead uh you walk around there and it's just like you know you see a whole phd on the on the floor in front of you because it's just like looking around everywhere a great deal of lithium just on the surface but of course what's important for us is to have the context and of course the contexts without the context we can't actually you know the thing is the lytics is giving some very interesting insights because it's showing us for example in these monumental buildings that it's discovered from or retrieved from from these excavations is actually a mixed ppna ppnb inventory which would also confirm that a lot of the stuff filling up these buildings wasn't actually there until the ppnb so it's actually also dating the the the process or at least uh it wasn't any earlier than the ppmb that these buildings became uh yeah filled or inundated yeah astonishing astonishing well i'm very conscious of time romping on but i do have do have to ask you how much more do you think there may still be to uncover yeah i mean um obviously we're continuing our excavations now we're still focusing on areas that have already been excavated uh by klaus schmidt for example this year uh 2021 we were working to the north of building d so the northern part of the main excavation area and to the east of it um where we are looking at these ppmd rectangular buildings uh some of which have been sort of partially excavated by cloud schmidt back in the 2010s 9 10 and carried on work there and we're just getting more and more material and more i mean very up to now a lot of the attention has been paid to the big monumental buildings and i think at the moment we're looking more at these uh smaller rectangular structures which uh we know comparatively little about compared to these uh bigger buildings so that's very exciting um so and of course uh in the as we saw in the in the um soundings i mean there's so much more to discover that we just didn't know um not only from just new excavations but also from a real appraisal and re-evaluation of what we already have so there's work there for many generations of archaeologists and i'm pretty sure [Music] further afield um the surrounding area and we already know about karan type and developments there do you expect more such sites to come to light i mean i know there are plenty of other sites around that have been excavated and provide you know um contextual information for what was going on in the in the whole area um do you think that picture is going to develop a lot more over time definitely i mean this is really exciting i mean this is something that started a few years back the excavations of callahan tetra there are numerous t-pillar sites already known from the surface survey um that was the point i was trying to get to yeah from the late 1990s up to about you know to the 2010s there were a number of surface surveys undertaken in the in the region around uh shannon particularly in the in the in the hilly areas surrounding the um the haran plain and you know at least a dozen other sites are known at t pillar sites and the most exciting thing is since uh two two years ago excavation started at carahan tepe and this year it's branched out further to a number of other t-pillar sites and you know this is really exciting for us um to be part of the gabetty tepe is now part of a larger project um which is being directed by uh professor najmi carl from university of istanbul uh together with the um channel of a museum and of course we're also involved the german archaeological institute as a corporation partner um at gobekti tepe um so there's excavations like going on carahan tepper there are further explosions going on at uh other sites like uh cepha tipper cyborg it's just a few to name a few but at these sites we're we're seeing also uh you know buildings t-pillar buildings similar symbolism um which is exciting for us because at last we have a co we can actually compare our data these new the data coming from these new sites um and and uh for example i mean one thing i can recently they opened up a small um sort of uh in in the channel author museum as a display of the first sort of uh fines from calahan tepe and although it's very similar it's different whereas for example go back to we have a focus on wild animal at callahan temper there seems to be a real focus on the human so i mean it seems that these sites may have had different sort of uh um [Music] i wouldn't say different understandings or different uh beliefs or rituals but i think they probably had a different emphasis on different things wow so we'll wait and see i mean it's all work in progress i mean it's really exciting for all of us wow oh that's brilliant i'm glad i sort of asked that question lee it's been fantastic i'm so glad that we might make contact with you we're able to enable this uh conversation is there anything you know that we've if we we've skipped over that's important to you that you you'd like to mention before we uh kind of wrap up well wrap up i mean if i can sort of i don't know make a sort of concluding remark i think so the take-home message would be you know go back to tepe is important however you know it's not something that will explain everything it's not this like i said the smoking gun of neutralization it's a very important site it is quite rightly a unesco world heritage site for the reasons that i mentioned the fact that you know we have these monumental structures we have this wonderful um symbolism there and this symbolism i think is not to do with the new neolithic way of life but what we're seeing here i think is the pinnacle of a hunter-gatherer tradition um i mentioned uh that there we have no evidence that quebec before domesticated animals or plants why is that when other contemporary sites like nevada choi we do have evidence i mean one has to ask why is that um was it perhaps a taboo i mean these are all questions that we're asking ourselves now um you know was this perhaps a last refuge of some sort of hunter-gatherer tradition where these narratives and myths were being really sort of um emphasized to keep these traditions going in the face of you know encroaching unifization i mean i think this is something we shouldn't actually see this as gemetti tepper and its symbolism and its magnificence has something to do with uh sort of advancing uh and uh development in the sense of towards from from hunting simple hunter gatherers to more complex farmers but i think it's really a pinnacle of what we're seeing in in a late paleolithic hunter-gatherer society fantastic what a fantastic round ugly thank you so much well thank you for the invitation no really a pleasure and uh you know i i would like to say number one i hope we can get you back on again uh to catch up on other things but number two uh mike and i have got to come over you know and you know hopefully do a bit of filming or certainly come visit and uh you know and see the site in flesh because we have not as yet been as you know we must so yeah there you go so in the meantime thank you uh so much lee and uh thank you viewers for watching and listeners for listening um we're going to say goodbye to you now um but you may interest you to know we're going to chat for a bit little bit longer with a few supplemental questions that have been asked by our patreon supporters so we're going to have a we're going to sneak off now and have a chat about that in the meantime if you'd like to listen to what we're going to chat about next uh then have a look over at uh on our patreon page and see if uh becoming one of our wonderful patreon community is something that you'd like to do but in the meantime thanks for thanks for listening watching uh hit the like and subscribe button if you haven't done already you know it helps and with that it's a goodbye from me yeah goodbye from me and it's uh well goodbye for me thank you excellent well done

Channel: The Prehistory Guys

Views: 188,205

Keywords: göbekli tepe, göbeklitepe theories, göbeklitepe 2022, gobekli tepe explained, göbeklitepe explained, lee clare, lee clare gobekli tepe, gobeklitepe interview, gobekli tepe podcast, ancient architects, t-shaped pillars, pre-pottery neolithic, gobekli tepe turkey, ancient turkey temple, karahan tepe turkey, karahan tepe pillars, göbekli type klaus schmidt, prehistory guys interview, prehistory interview, prehistory podcast, gobekli tepe, ancient history

Id: 16paeSPUIjo

Length: 55min 22sec (3322 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022