A Cathedral on a Hill
On a dry, rounded hilltop in southeastern Anatolia is Göbekli Tepe, a collection of the oldest known megalithic structures in the world. The earliest building phase dates to between 9500 and 9000 BCE, a period known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. The site consists of multiple circular enclosures, the largest of which is 65 feet across. At the center of these circles stand two massive, T-shaped limestone pillars, some reaching 18 feet in height and weighing an estimated eight to ten metric tons. Smaller, similar pillars are embedded in the surrounding walls.
These limestone monoliths were quarried from the surrounding plateau, sometimes only a few hundred meters away from the construction site. One unfinished pillar found in a nearby quarry measures 7 meters long and would have weighed around 50 metric tons. The people who cut and moved these stones did so without the aid of domesticated animals or metal tools. The pillars are not plain; many are covered in detailed reliefs of animals. Foxes, snakes, wild boars, gazelles, and vultures are common motifs. Some pillars are more abstractly human, with low-relief carvings of arms, hands, and loincloths, showing they represent stylized people or deities.
A Revolution in Thought
The existence of Göbekli Tepe challenges the long-held model of Neolithic development. For decades, archaeologists believed that agriculture was the prerequisite for settled life, which then allowed for the development of complex religion and monumental architecture. Göbekli Tepe shows the opposite may be true. The builders were hunter-gatherers. Analysis of over 100,000 bone fragments from the site shows they hunted wild game like gazelle, boar, and red deer. There is no evidence of domesticated animals or plants in the site's earliest layers.
The lead excavator, Klaus Schmidt, theorized that Göbekli Tepe was a ritual site, a ritual center for nomadic bands across the region. The immense labor required to build and maintain the site may have created the pressure to domesticate plants and animals simply to feed the workforce. The world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat were found at a site just 20 miles away, dating to about 500 years after Göbekli Tepe's construction began. Around 8000 BCE, after more than a millennium of use, the entire site was deliberately buried, filled in with earth and debris by its creators. This act of intentional preservation is why the structures remain in a good state today.