Göbekli Tepe

Göbekli Tepe, Neolithic site near Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey. The site, believed to have been a sanctuary of ritual significance, is marked by layers of carved megaliths and is estimated to date to the 9th–10th millennium bce.

At Göbekli Tepe (Turkish: “belly hill”), near the Syrian border, a number of T-shaped limestone megaliths, some of which surpass 16 feet (5 metres) in height and weigh as much as 50 tons, are arranged in circular formations. Several such formations are positioned on top of one another: each completed circle was covered with dirt, and the process began again atop the same site. While some of the megaliths are blank, others are carved on their broader sides with elaborate designs featuring foxes, scorpions, lions, and other imagery.

Göbekli Tepe, which predates Stonehenge by some 6,000 years, was first investigated in the 1960s but was dismissed as a medieval cemetery. It was explored again in the 1990s, when its true age, which was estimated by comparing the remnants of tools discovered at the site with those that had been carbon-dated from nearby sites, was revealed. The remains of undomesticated plant material and tens of thousands of wild animal bones—chiefly gazelle bones—have been uncovered there, but the lack of trash pits, hearths, or other signals of domestic life indicates that it was most likely not a permanent settlement. Most experts instead identify it as a ritual site, one that may have attracted worshipers from great distances.

Because remains at the site indicate that Göbekli Tepe was constructed by hunter-gatherers (the presence of such quantities of wild animal bones indicates that they had not yet domesticated animals or begun farming), the site has prompted some to reconsider the relationship between settlement and sociocultural development. Although it has long been presumed that settlement was a prerequisite for the construction of temples and the development of complex social systems, the work needed to construct Göbekli Tepe would have required that a large number of builders be housed and fed in one place, meaning that the coordinated effort may have necessitated settlement, not followed it.