It’s the last day of the excavating year at Gobekli Tepe, the hill-top neolithic site whose circles of huge decorated T-shaped stones are at least 5,000 years older than any other monumental structure ever found.
Workmen have already buried the bases of the stones in rubble to protect them from the winter rain. Now they are laying raised walkways into the centre of a site that was previously off-limits to visitors.
In between shouted instructions, the German archaeologist who has been excavating the site since 1994 sums up four more months of digging. "This is not like an ordinary excavation, uncovering a wall here and the corner of a house there," Klaus Schmidt says, standing at the highest point of a 15-metre high artificial mound that covers nine hectares.
"In 14 years, we have uncovered barely five percent of what is here. There are decades of work ahead."
Apart from a new transverse cut to the left of the main dig, and the excavation of a small, late circle that probably dates from about 8,500 B.C., little appears to have changed since March. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive].
But there have been striking discoveries: a U-shaped stone sculpted with leopards and a boar that Schmidt compares to the Lion Gate at Mycenae; two almost life-size sculptures of a boar and wild cat found embedded within the rubble walls surrounding one early enclosure.
Schmidt and his team have also uncovered a hollowed-out stone, roughly four-foot square, lying cracked in the middle of one of the circles.
"We found similar stones in other enclosures, and we assumed they are some sort of door", Schmidt says. "The position of this one makes us wonder whether the circles weren’t vaulted," like the trulli of southern Italy, or the famous bee-hive houses at Harran, just south of Gobekli Tepe.
Potentially much more significant, although almost invisible to the untrained eye, archaeologists have also uncovered evidence that the builders of at least one of the oldest circles had dug roughly five meters down through the mound before erecting the standing stones on the bedrock.
"For the time being this is just hypothesis, but this leaves us wondering whether the site dates back to before [c. 9500 b.c.], when the earliest circles were built," Schmidt says. "Piling up a five-meter mound is not the work of one night."
Whatever the carbon-dating eventually shows, Gobekli Tepe stands at the cusp of what is arguably the biggest social revolution in human history - the transformation of semi-nomadic hunters into settled farmers.
Archaeologists now know a great deal about the whens and wheres of the birth of agriculture.
DNA tests on wild wheat growing on Karacadag, a mountain just east of Gobeklitepe, suggest it may have been the source of early cultivated strains. At Nevali Cori, a neolithic village 40 miles northwest of Schmidt’s site, archaeologists found seeds of domesticated einkorn wheat dating from 9000 b.c.
But debate still rages - and probably always will - about what it was that led neolithic groups to transfer almost all their energies into farming.
For many experts, climate change was behind the transformation. Global temperatures had been warming gradually since the last Ice Age. Between 10,800 and 9,500 b.c., they suddenly plummeted again.
The Greenland ice cap cooled by roughly 15 degrees. Rain stopped falling on the Fertile Crescent. "The region where grasses could be cultivated shrank to the very upper edges of the Middle East, northern Syria and southeastern Turkey," says Ofer Bar-Yosef, MacCurdy Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at Harvard and a doyen of paleolithic studies.
"Even there, resources were limited - people wanted to keep them for themselves."
But the location, age and sheer size of Gobekli Tepe have led some to posit a radically different explanation for the change. "The intense cultivation of wild wheat may have first occurred to supply sufficient food to the hunter-gatherers who quarried 7-ton blocks of limestone with flint flakes," writes Stephen Mithen, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom.
The move to farming may "have been driven as much by ideology as by the need to cope with environmental stress."
Klaus Schmidt appears in two minds about the theory. In a book he wrote in German about Gobekli Tepe, he suggests that "temples came first, and cities followed." Sipping sugary tea outside a portakabin at the entrance to the site, he is more circumspect.
"There is no doubt this was a place of huge feasts, and hunter-gatherers would have had difficulty gathering together enough food to feed large groups," he says. "Some American colleagues say such feasts may have been the origin of domestication."
His caution stems from growing evidence uncovered over the last five years or so that domestication was a much longer process than previously believed.
Experts now think farmers probably sowed grain for at least a thousand years before domesticated strains appeared. In 2004, French archaeologists showed how neolithic settlers had corralled wild cattle in southern Turkey before transporting them to Cyprus.
Professor Bar-Yosef has had his doubts about the theory of ideological farmers since the start. "First you need to get your economy working," he says. "Then you build the monuments that justify the complex social organization that requires."
Complex, he adds, can sometimes mean unjust. "You can’t build places like Gobekli with kibbutzim," he says. "I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody somewhere in the Fertile Crescent finds evidence of slave labour in the near future."
Editor's Note: Nicolas Birch specializes in Turkey, Iran and the Middle East.
http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/gobekli/pp120908c.shtml
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