The Ancients - Göbekli Tepe: The First Temple?

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

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 SoundsThe 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

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Listen to the new Audible original podcast, The Unusual Suspects with Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell. Go to audible.ca slash Unusual Suspects with Kenya Barris and Malcolm Gladwell. Go to audible.ca slash unusual suspects podcast and listen now. 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 Gebekli 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. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the fascinating story of Gebekli 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. Quebec-Litepe is quickly becoming one of the most famous early Neolithic settlements from anywhere in the world, and the archaeology is breathtaking. Our guest today is Dr. Lee Clare, an archaeologist who coordinates the Gebekli Tepe research project at the German Archaeological Institute. Lee is one of the leading experts on the archaeology so far uncovered at Gebekli 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 Gebekli Tepe.

pleasure to interview him about the Stone Age mystery that is Gebekli Tepe. Lee, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Lee Hogan Well, thank you for having me. Toby Hogan It's my pleasure because to talk about Gebekli Tepe, I mean, this feels likely 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. Lee Hogan 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 of the same age with similar material culture. So the area itself, the region is very exciting.

And we'll highlight that how Gebekli Tepe is almost the name that people think of, but that there's more archaeology beside Gebekli Tepe. But set the scene for us first of all, Lee, where in the world are we talking about with Gebekli Tepe? Okay, we're talking about southeastern Turkey. I mean, if you grab your map and Google, you'll find the city in the southeastern 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 Neolithicisation. So the first sort of introduction of farming, settled communities, it's where it all took off. It's one of those core regions of Neolithicisation in the world. So is it on the cusp of the fertile crescent that is a popular type today? That's right, yeah. And with the topography of Quebec Le Tepe today, should we be imagining, I mean, can you see the Euphrates in the Tigris rivers or is it quite high up in the landscape? What should we be envisaging on the ground at Gebekli Tepe?

Okay, at Gebekli Tepe you wouldn't see the Euphrates, in fact, from the site. We are quite a number of kilometres 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 Heran Plain to the south. We're about 400 or 500 meters above the Heran Plain, so about 770 meters above sea level. The foothills of the eastern Taurus Mountains come through southern Turkey. And actually from the side itself, when you look northwards, I was actually there just last week, it's been snowing in the mountains there and from the Gebekatepe site you can actually look northwards towards the eastern Taurus and see the snow-covered peaks. I mean you can actually see

Nemrudda which is another UNESCO World Heritage site there in the region, a bit younger than Gebekatepe obviously. But it's like a Taurus foothill sort of region looking down onto the plane of Iran, which then extends southwards into northern Syria. And is that Mount Nemrud with those famous sculptures of faces in the big rock? Yes, that Kingdom of Komajin and so on. I said that's a topic for another day indeed. Now in regards to when we're talking about with Gebekli Tepe, in passingly 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? 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. Neurotization is something that happened over a very long period of time. It didn't actually start in the early Holocene, sort of components of that package, the 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 Neurotization sort of story, whereby the earliest sort of signs of that sedentism are much earlier than Gobekli Tepe and they appear in the Levant in the late Paleolithic, in the late Pleistocene. So we're talking about 15,000, 20,000 years before present, in fact. So that's the Ice Age. That's still the Ice Age. The late Ice Age, yeah.

But of course, Gobekli Tepe comes in about 9,600, 9,500 BC. So at the beginning of the early Holocene, which is a climate amelioration following the end of the Younger Dryas. So the Younger Dryas is 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 several communities coming in. And Gebek-i-T this area and you get the first settled communities coming in and Gebekatepe is one of the first, I say one of the first, not the first, there are earlier settled communities in the region, but one of the first settled communities appearing in southeastern parts of Turkey. I know it's a bit more complicated than this, but is it almost like

kind of that transitional phase between what has often been terms like hunter-gatherers moving around small groups, small communities of people into what will ultimately be, thousands of years later in that area, be the emergence of farming and settled communities and ultimately the emergence of cities, that kind of transitional period? That's right. Interestingly, from the period before Kbekli Tepe, this epipallelitic 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 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 Shannon Wolf, 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 time with the more intense investigations going on down in the region now in Shannon Wolf. I think we will find the predecessors of Gebekli Tepe. There is one site that's quite early that's within the frame of the Tash Tepe

project looking at these sites in the region, the Neolithic sites, which is PPNA in date, which is like 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 ninth millennium BC. Well, that's another term that we should address straight away. You said PPNA there and I think there's PPNB2. What do we mean by these two terms? Okay.

I mean, PPN is the abbreviation for pre-pottery neolithic. Oh, wow. Which means, obviously, as I said earlier, we have this sort of neolithization process going on. And pottery, the production of pottery is one of the things that comes in during the neolithization. And at this point in time, we have sedentary populations, we have other things going on like cultivation of wild cereal, but we don't yet have pottery.

So it's getting there gradually, but we don't have have pottery. So it's getting there gradually, but we don't have pottery yet. That's why 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 we distinguish between an early PPNB, a middle PPNB, and a late PPNB. So, you know, to give you a rough sort of chronology for that, we said the PPNA starts roughly about 9,500 BC, so at the beginning of the early Holocene and the climate amelioration, and goes about 8,700.

At 8,700, we've got the PPNB coming in with the early PPNB, which goes about 8,200, and the middle PPNB starts, et cetera, et cetera. So we're looking really at the early, the PPM is the earliest sort of manifestation of this sort of pre-Portuino-lific in the region. 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?

I don't think there are any major changes in the topography. I think that came a bit later with farming and then you have the erosion, that alleviation and that's something that came in a bit later. Regarding the environment, obviously any region that's settled by human beings, they can use it. We're very adaptive. We can adapt to most things. Of course, Quebec-Ytépur was very attractive, I think. The region was very attractive at the time in the earlier Holocene. We don't have a great deal of paleoclimate proxies from the region. We rely quite heavily on 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 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 Gebekli Tepe, it would have been a lot different. It would have been a sort of 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. Gazelleelle was most important animal for hunters at that time in the wet areas you would have wild boy you would have had you would have had you know all of these animals running around it would be a very attractive place for hunters and gatherers world. And of course, the question as to why the sedentism and why neolithicisation started here 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 10,000, 11,000 years ago in this region. Well, the work by yourself and the team and everyone who's been working at Quebec-Litepe 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 Quebec-L Tepe? How long has the site been known? Lee Huyden Okay, the site was first discovered in the

1960s, in fact. It was a survey operation looking for Neolithic sites. That was conducted by Halid Şambel, who was a professor at the University of Istanbul, and also with colleagues from the United States, from Chicago in fact. And they were doing a series of surveys in southeastern parts of Turkey and also in all that region down there looking for first indications of the Neolithic in this region because of course they had already found stuff in adjacent parts. And for a long time it was thought that Turkey was the modern sort of Anatolian peninsula was avoided by the Neolithic because I thought people going around 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 in Anatolia. For example, Çatalhöyük would be a site that was discovered at this time as well, the work of Mellard there and Hadjullah. But of course, in the southeastern part of the country, we have then sites like Chayonu, which were discovered in the course of this survey. But also, Gobekatepe was discovered during their survey work, but was never excavated at the time. It wasn't actually excavated until the mid-1990s. And then from then on, has it been season on season, even with COVID, of learning more about the site? Yeah. I mean, apart from the COVID year, we've been there, well not me personally.

Of course, the work at the site is very strongly connected to German research or to German researchers. Harald 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 Schannel of a museum. And he was then followed by his student, Klaus Schmidt, who is really well known for his excavations at Quebec-Ytépe. He was always involved in the field work and then as excavation director in his own right

after the Hauptmann retired. And he was there until 2014 when he sadly passed away. And then I came in and I happened to be there and the rest is history, as you say. But yeah, I mean, the site has been now under excavation for about 30 years. 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 center of any newspaper article or any discussion of Quebec Lutepé today that the site is known for, first of all? Well, I'm very glad you didn't say the word temple. I'm holding myself back, Liam. I'm holding myself back. Very good, because of course, I'm not too keen on that word. Of course, it's actually in the media, 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 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 centers, there were rituals taking place in these structures, but at the same time, they're also being used for people 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 with all of these carvings, those are narratives, those are stories that meant something to these people. 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 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 12,000 years ago. 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 large buildings that seem to always take up so much of the story of Gebekli Tepe? 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, 8, 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 10 to 20 meters depending on

where you're looking, which building it is. They are buildings, they were roofed over, and they have walls. Frequently it's said that they're dry stone walls and not dry stone walls. They actually have mortar in between. So, like a modern mortar. Oh, wow. And at regular intervals in the wall, you have T-pillars, so 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. I say at regular intervals, sometimes 10, 11, 12 in the circle within the walls.

And in the center or near to the center 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 meters in height.

So really quite, once I next look up, it's quite an impressive thing to see. Of course, they're carved with various depictions in low relief. Also, we have high reliefs. Of course, on top of this structure would have been a roof. We know they were roofed over. I think perhaps the most intriguing of our new results is that these buildings were occupied or were in use for a very long period of time. 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 date. So we can say that the earliest phases of these buildings were like PPNA in date. So sort of end of the 10th millennium BC and they actually continued into the early PPNB to about mid-9th millennium. So we're looking at sort of, you know, a few hundred years and these buildings were constantly being used, were being reshaped and lots of recycling going on. They were moving T 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. So we've arrived in winter. We're getting up in the dark. The commutes are stuffy. The person next to you is coughing. I've got just the thing for you, an excellent escape. I'm Dan Snow, host of the Dan Snow's History Hit podcast, where I whisk you away into the greatest stories in history. Join me on the Inca Trail in Peru, where I'll tell you the story of Machu Picchu, or travel with me to the mighty Colosseum in Rome to find out just what the gladiatorial games were really like. Follow Thomas Cochran, the real master and commander

across the high seas. I take you around the world to where history happened. So check out Dan Snow's History Hit for the best historical escapism this winter, wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 sort of 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 clear pattern that corresponds and coincides, you know, correlates

rather with the building phases that we can see in the building archaeology. So we can actually see that we do have a long duration that these buildings were in use, a long use life as we say. That is so extraordinary. I always associate more with much later constructions. For instance, we've done something on the ground. It's a mud. It's a sticky mud mixture. Okay. Well, there we go. Okay. thank you for highlighting that. 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 tea pillars, which we'll explore a bit more in the second, is it all created from locally acquired stone? They're not doing huge distances to bring stone to the site of them. 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 teaplas from the spot where they were probably more or less erected and put upright. And then the floor was then smoothed and, you know, Bob's your uncle. There's your floor and it's very high quality, obviously. Other buildings have plaster floors, which are imitating then these probably these natural limestone floors. So, you know, these guys knew what they were doing. It was a very advanced technology. I mean, we can't actually imagine them as being, often people say, cavemen. No, they were like us.

They were physically like us, cognitively perhaps a little 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. Well, let's explore these tea pillars a bit more now, Lee, because they are absolutely extraordinary. And I think that the clues in the name in their kind of shapes are kind of a long stem, but the horizontal top part of a tea 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 kind of sculpture things, how big are we talking with them, Lee? Are they life-size or bigger

than life-size? Yeah, okay. I mean, if we're talking about the T-pillars, I mean, the tallest, 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 are about three meters, three and a half meters. So they're larger than us, larger than human. That's why we speak about monumentality. But of course, monumentality is also relative. I mean, for us, they're not really monumental for our understanding.

If we stand in a city and there's a skyscraper that's dozens of stories high, that's more monumental for us. Like five, six metres high is not really monumental, but for them living in an environment where they didn't have any of that sort of metropolis or what we have today, five and a half metres, six metre high monoliths would have been very much monumental. And the monoliths, so that's kind of like monolith or one stone, is that what the phrase is? One piece, yeah, that's right. So is the evidence from Gobekli Tepe, is it the earliest datable evidence we know of for monumentality for the creation of monuments by humans?

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 meter high wooden whatever, that would have been for them, I think, monumental. But yeah, I mean, strictly speaking, for example, our UNESCO application, our UNESCO site since 2018, and of course, that's about monumentality. 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. But yeah, so we could say it would be fair enough to say it's one of the earliest monumental buildings, monumental structures that we know so far. Jason Vale As an archaeologist who's done a lot of work with the media, you know how much we want people to say it is the or not, but also I appreciate how that's always a sucker in into something that you don't want to say so. I don't like working with superlatives. I just hate it.

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 sister sites? Yeah, for example, Karahan Tepe is one, Gobekatepe is the other, and there's another site called Ayyan La 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 teepiller

sites down there. And there are smaller sites as well. And names like Navaluccioli would be there, Cyborgs, Sefer Tepe. So there are numerous now that we have a dozen sites we now know down there in the region. But these three sites, Ayanlar, Göbekli Tepe, Tehran Tepe, those are the big central sites. They're the bigger sites, which have this very long duration from the beginning of the early Holocene, mid-10th millennium BC, to the PPNB, end of the 9th millennium BC. Are they quite close together? So, potentially after more research suggesting whether there was interactions between the settlements?

There was definitely interaction. I mean, we have the symbolism. I mean, there are differences. There's lots of similarities, but there are sort of nuances and differences between, for example, in the symbolism, whereby at Gbeki Tepe you have more animals depicted, at Karahan Tepe there's more of a focus on the human form. So 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 the first sort of making

the first comparisons with our material. So that's something we need to watch out for in the future. A network was there, economic, cultural, social, it was definitely there. It's all very exciting stuff. I mean, you mentioned how there's a lot of depictions of animals in on Gebekeli Tepe or at Gebekeli Tepe. Is it on these tea pillars that you see quite a lot of that animal art? 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 are a couple of centimetres sort of protruding from the pillar. And you have high

reliefs with like statues that are actually carved from the pillar itself but still attached to the pillar. It's a 3D yeah. Yeah 3D yeah. I mean those are extra and what kind of animals are being shown? 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, 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 with like 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 stories were attached to them. Of course, they're choosing these leopards are great and wild boars. I love them. It's also interesting. So they 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? No. I mean, I think the wild animals themselves are attached to stories because, of course, they could say, okay, I just went out and I saw a wild war and I'm going to put it on my pillow now. But no, they come in different constellations and I think we're actually seeing here narratives and that's the most important thing. And this is why, in my opinion, Gobek-i-T Tepe 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 telling us the traditions and the stories, the foundation myths of hunter-gatherer populations before dating, before the Neolithic, before this whole process took off. In that respect, they're so valuable. I think that's the reason why the site really deserves its UNESCO status because it does

say it's so important for humanity, the fact that we have these narratives still preserved. 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? 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 minerals. Because of course, what

I didn't mention just now is that we found color remains of color 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 have probably been sort of grinding up and applying to the statues, probably 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. And the red colour, do we think from ochre or something else? Yeah, yeah, that's what I think. red colour. And the red colour, do we think from ochre or something else? 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 they're quite interesting to talk about too. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, of course you say there are less human depictions, but the teapills themselves are depictions of a human form. 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 center of that building, they have actually carved arms in low relief. They have a belt, they have a loin cloth, all carved in low relief. They have necklaces, but the face isn't depicted. They didn't want to depict the face for something. They didn't need to depict the face. They have necklaces, but the face isn't depicted. They didn't want to depict the face, 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 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 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 their position as part of a ritual that's also possible. But the bodies in fact they also have, you know, they're shown with arms in different sort of gestures. And on a lot of occasions, especially on the larger statues, we see them that the hands actually framing the genitals. So phalli, the phallus is very important to this community. There are lots of penises at Gobekli Tepe.

What does Gobekli Tepe and Pompeii have in common? 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 that thing everyone thinks about. If we don't use the label temple, but we keep that kind of extraordinary special label there too, can we imagine them always being kind of like multipurpose centers 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? 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 a 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're having more children, other groups growing in size, you have more demands on the resources in the landscape, you have perhaps increasing territoriality because of the sedentism, because of the growing population. Whose hunting ground is that? Does it belong to this site or that site? You have first conflicts coming up, perhaps because of surplus accumulation, people are sort of, you know, accumulating wealth or at least materials. And of course, that leads to conflict,

as it always does. So you have these buildings are perhaps places of conflict mitigation, where people are coming together to mitigate those problems. I mean, we have no evidence for the conflict at this time, no evidence for warfare, strangely enough. And 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. I mean, you know, packed with this incredible art and 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 this structure, 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 good back to the table how they treated their dad away from those great buildings. When we always thought the burials of being the special buildings you know at least of some sort of important individuals because of course you know with the the changes taking place in the sort of population. place in this sort of population at that time, you know, an increasing number of people, you'd expect some sort of incipient hierarchization 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 the special building so far. I say so far, you know, there's always, you know, it's happened. What we do have is quite characteristic for the region itself and for the time, so for the pre-Potrnianific period in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean, which is subfloor burial. So we have two burials so far at Quebec du Temps and all of them from domestic contexts because of course that's something also is quite important for Quebec du Temps that we've now realized it's not just a ritual site, because there was 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 into a separate burial ground away from the 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 Gobekli Tepe. We have one which is I think a teenage or in her young early 20s, a female individual in a hawker 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 little while and they exhumed the skull or parts of the body. We also have with regard to the skull and the so-called skull cult at Gebekli Temple,

which is also quite well known from the East Mediterranean at this time, the skulls were exhumed and plastered in the shape with the features. We don't have any plastered skulls at Gebekli Temple. 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 they're perhaps using to suspend them and to hang them. You know, 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. I mean, the ancestors were so important. They didn't have history books or books that hold onto that knowledge. And they probably knew that the knowledge was in the brain, in the skull, that was in the seat of the spirit. And of course, the ancestors were the all-knowing, and they did that, I think,

to celebrate the ancestors. So ancestor veneration, animism was at the center of the rituals and the belief systems at this time. 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 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 Gebekli Tepe

or in that society, you'd have thought that might be a human nature thing that 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. Yeah, it's funny you said 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 earlier 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 Gobekatepe 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 Orphe region at a a site called Sephotepa, there was also a small room in a building discovered, which also contained numerous skulls. So the burial traditions were varied, there was the inhumations, but also this sort of skull collection point, as it were, in some of the buildings. Skull collection point, well there you go. Sorry, it's a bit of a strange term to use. Not very archaeological of me.

This is the ancient, 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 dwellings at Quebec-Litepe? If so, what do they look like? Yeah. As I said, we now know that the site was not a purely ritual site as previously posited, but in fact it was a settlement from the offset. So in fact, we've got a couple of new, I say new, back in 2017-18, we had two new

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, etc. 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 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 archaeology. I couldn't drill for the archaeology, we had to remove it first. So we went through into little sondages in several places, right down to the base of the mound and found 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 structures, or domestic structures rather, dwellings in these oldest layers, which are very small, sort of round structures, but they had no T-pillars, but there was a multi-phase, had several floors used, you know, you could see the walking horizons in their activity zones with hearths and evidence of people chipping and doing napping and producing beads from stone and animal or bird bones, that sort of thing. All the kind of necklace things that you talked about earlier, the necklaces. So very, very domestic and that increases over time.

And in fact, by the height of the site in the mid-ninth millennium BC, 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 PPNA, in this sort of period from 9600 to 8700, buildings, whether domestic or special, were usually round oval. And then at the onset of the PPNB, about 8,700 BC, 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 rectangular comes in and it sort of increases over time as well. That's one way of data, that's one of the differences between the PPN8 and the PPNB, the shape of the buildings. So yeah, I mean, at the time of the PPNB, I think, we were looking at a very much a flourishing settlement, a very much a village or perhaps even bigger, in fact.

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 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, thrown out the rubbish, that sort of thing. They move to the eastern side. They do that for a decade or so. Oh, it's getting a bit nasty. Or they split into two groups. That's the way this mound then develops over the 1,500 years of occupation of the site.

The dating is still a 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 PPMB. Then we're looking at a major settlement with, you know, perhaps even a couple of hundred or more people. Wow. I mean, I'm, you mentioned hearths there. So I'm guessing those hearths 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? Yeah, I mean the rubbish dumps, or say the rubbish pits are very much important for us.

Anarchologists dream of rubbish dumps. We just want everyone's rubbish. But of course, we get a good insight into the animals being hunted. Like I said, the gazelle was very important. We have the horn cause and 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 vicinity of Gebekli Tepe. So called kites or desert kites are known from Jordan, for example, we have them also in the Atash-Tepela region of Shanu-Ulfa. So actually we're looking at sort of organized hunting, industrial hunting in a way, in that they were driving 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 that's the only way of then actually sort of feeding your, perhaps, at that time. And water, water resources, I'm not drifting tangents now. That's okay, that's okay. But of course, water supply was crucial. I mean, it was always thought, Gobekatepe had no water supply. People were walking to a water source,

perhaps kilometers away from the site and coming back. But we don't know whether there was 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. There are actually, if you remember, or as I said, the climate conditions, they were improving after the last ice age at the time of

occupation and rainfall was even greater than today. Perhaps we're even looking at summer rainfall as well. They were harvesting that rainwater in large cisterns and collecting it via channels into these large pits and that being used at the site to as a source of water flow for the population. Wow. I mean, you read my mind,

I was going to ask about cisterns 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 cisterns 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.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, we haven't got the latrines yet. I'd like to find a toilet. I was going to ask about the toilets. Okay. I haven't got one of those yet, but we're still looking for one of those. 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? 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 amount of lithics coming from Quebecie-Tepa, 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. Of course, this is made from local material, 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. The assemblage, everything from arrowheads to scrapers to drills, that sort of know, it's all there. And for that reason, we know it was a, you know, a settlement scenario. 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 could 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. It's a kind of hammer stones kind of thing. 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. And of course you had like imports of obsidian, very small amounts of obsidian coming in, less than 1%, and that's coming from different sources from eastern Anatolia. That also testifies some down the line contact with groups living further to the north in the more mountainous regions. Lee, you've painted a wonderful picture of this society. These people are living some 10,000 years ago. And it's an astonishing story, that of Quebec-Litepe.

And it sounds like there's going to be even more coming out of the ground very, very, very shortly. But you also painted 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 Gebekli Tepe? Does it all fall off a cliff? What do we know? Yeah. We have very little evidence for what was going on at Gebekli Tepe after around the end of the 9th millennium BC. So 8,000 BC is when it all starts to disappear. Of course, that's the time

that we get more and more sites with domesticated species of animals, goats to sheep, that sort of thing, and your crops. It's going from wild wheat to domesticated wheat. That's right. So I think that plays a part, the fact that people are now turning away from these hunter-gatherer traditions to these farming traditions 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 Quebec-etepa, these big enclosures or these big special buildings, they also disappear. We don't have anything comparable until the late Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age in prehistory. So that's quite remarkable. I think the reason is that it was actually the farming, of course. The location of Quebec-Ytep at the moment, 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 kilometers into the plain, into the Haram 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 belief systems and the social structures change as well along with that. And I think recently I proposed that there was, we don't have any good evidence for social hierarchies or the elites at this time in the pre-Portueneolithic. And I think it was very much to do with the fact that they didn't really exist.

In fact, we're looking at inspired individuals, charismatic individuals, which were playing that role, perhaps gifted storytellers or shamans, that sort of thing, taking on that role. And of course they were no longer needed, it changed. People 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. Well Lee, this has been a fascinating chat. We've explored all these different parts of the amazing archaeological story of Quebec du 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.

Lee Huyen 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 complete work at Kapeckli Tepe. In fact, there's no need to actually excavate the whole site. It's always like we have to save something for the next generations coming along with archaeologists 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 task at hand and it's going to keep us busy at least to the end of my working life and I've got quite a few years left yet. 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. Well, thanks again for having me, Tristan, it's been great fun.

Well there you go, there was Dr Lee Clare giving you an awesome overview of the archaeology so far uncovered at Gebekli 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

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