Ah, thank you for summarising, GreenWyvern. I missed that and apologise for not replying.
What huge questions! My answers must be oversimplified, but hopefully I give you the idea.
The knowledge I am talking about is pragmatic, but it is encoded in stories that can be interpreted as spiritual. There aren’t gods, as such, but spiritual characters whose stories encode information. My research is from a science perspective.
As to the decisions about when someone is initiated into the higher levels of knowledge, that varies a lot across cultures. Some do it according to hereditary rules, some according to the knowledge already attained and skills displayed, many to some sort of combination. Even within the hundreds of Australian Aboriginal cultures, the answer to that question varies.
Highest on the types-of-knowledge list is navigation and knowing the landscape. In Australian Aboriginal terms, that is all about the connection to Country. The need to understand the landscape for resources is obvious, and for navigation for trade and to go to ceremonies. Some Yanuwa elders have been recorded singing over 800 kilometres of pathways. These are known as songlines. Navigation is sung, and related at ceremonies which are events which enable songs and stories to be performed to ensure maintenance of knowledge. Knowledge which is performed is much more memorable than knowledge just reeled off. Hence performance sites, such as at Gobekli Tepe, are essential.
The Native American equivalent of Aboriginal songlines are pilgrimage trails, the Inca used ceques … I could find them in every non-literate culture. For the purpose of my research, songlines can be seen as vast memory palaces, because information is performed in rituals associated with each of multiple locations along the songlines.
Animal knowledge is also sung and recorded. So children will learn the names of animals and identifying. With initiation, more details are learned about animals - which parts are used for particular nutrients, behaviour, finding them and the way they act as indicators for other aspects of the environment. They will record hundreds of species - not just mammals. For the Native American Navajo, knowledge of over 700 invertebrates have been recorded from two elders.
Plants - again, hundreds of species. A spindly little plant might be one which stores water in the roots, and has to be identified from all the other spindly little plants. And so on.
Genealogies are particularly complex. They are essential for allocating responsibilities and rights over Country. Plus lots more.
Add in astronomy - Australian Aboriginal astronomy is particularly detailed. And ethics and laws and timekeeping, resource management, trade agreements, a detailed pharmacopeia …
The information is stored in songs and ceremonies, but also using art work. A lot of this is kept restricted to initiated elders, hence the power. But that is also essential to stop the chinese whispers effect and survival knowledge being corrupted. We have stories in Australia dating back to the end of the last ice age, keeping knowledge of changes in the landscape accurate for all that time! See Patrick Nunn’s research and book, The Edge of Memory.
Art works are mnemonic devices, both on rocks and other fixed surfaces, and on portable devices - bark paintings, carved stone or wood devices known as tjuringa (churinga) and many other forms. These act as really powerful memory devices for vast amounts of information. This is a major area of my research. I test all these methods and am astounded how effective they are. They had to be - everything they know had to be stored in memory. The rights to those devices and designs are restricted to those initiated into the rights. This is true of oral cultures all over the world.
One that I have tested and a lot of my readers now use is based on the African lukasa of the Luba people. I get endless emails about how shocked people are how well these work:
Once you think of the dependence of non-literate cultures on memory palaces, performance spaces (public and restricted) and mnemonic designs, then sites like Gobekli Tepe offer a completely different, and entirely pragmatic, explanation to their purpose. Gobekli Tepe is perfectly designed to serve this purpose, which is why it wasn’t residential. It was their university.
It is very nice for a real expert to come here and share stuff with us. Thank you!
Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!
TEKELI-LI!
Memory codes are so very ancient: Is it conceivable they could have some relationship to the development of human languages?
Memory is an amazing thing - but don’t be surprised by what is possible. Theater actors, for example, memorize entire plays which run to a hundred pages or more, within a few weeks, simply by repetition. There are those who can/could recite the entire bible or Koran. Imagine what was possible when the memorization was your life purpose (and essential to survival) for someone not distracted by the information overload a fresh book, newspaper, or evening of television daily. An interesting point to note is that sequence seems to be the key to high volume memorization. Cue someone with a few words and they can pick up from that point in a sequence and continue to recite forward from there.
lynne-42, seconding thanks for those posts; very interesting information.
Also the information was probably in the form of poetry, which has extra structure which makes memorization easier.
I really think so, septimus. But I can’t say more than that I think mnemonics and language development are closely linked. I haven’t done the research. There were quite a few linguists really interested in my work and we shared notes when I was doing the research. But there are just too many directions to follow and there is a rotten limit of 24 hours in every day.
One archaeology professor pointed me to the Neanderthal cave stone circles and wrote that my theory now works back a 100,000 years earlier than I had ever considered.
I am married to an archaeologist who is really keen on human origins - and we both love the idea. But we’d need a lot more evidence to make the case stand up to academic rigour.
I really hope that someone does that research!
Sequence is absolutely essential and is one of the key criteria in the criteria I set for determining if a site was a ceremonial knowledge centre. I look at stone and timber circles which are found all over the world during the transition from mobile to sedentary living. Mobile is moving between known sites - not nomadic wandering. Australian Aboriginal cultures have been mobile or settled for the last 10,000 years, according to the archaeologists.
I set all sorts of criteria to test the theory. One is that if a single standing stone or timber arrangement hasn’t got a sequence built in, then it can’t be used as a memory palace. So any set of standing stones or timbers in a fairly random arrangement will kill the theory. I haven’t found one yet, and there are over a thousand known sites.
A henge ditch without a flat bottom would kill it too. The ditches were protected performance sites. V-shaped defensive ditches came later in the iron age.
A pleasure, thorny locust. Thank you for the thanks. I am obsessed by this stuff and worry that I go on and on and on about it!
Yes. The term ‘songs’ for Indigenous performances is my simplification. Some anthropologists call them poetry, some call them chants, some call them song-poetry. Aboriginal people use the term ‘songs’ so I tend to use that. Any rhythmic form, with rhyme and sequence, is more memorable than straight prose.
I am rather fond of experimental archeology, those enterprising folk who built a roundhouse farm and discovered the little round pits under the eves by the door weren’t for holding pots of drinking water for convenience, they were for chicken dust bathing =)
I have amazed people while sitting around waiting for something making lucet cord or drop spinning. Yup, I am one of those whackjobs that can be given a sheep, a hand axe, a knife and the right little chunk of land [like our farm …] and can end up with dinner and cloth. <shrug> I also know a fair amount of practical herbology despite having a serious black thumb. You could drop mrAru and I back into prehistory [or even into the dark ages] and other than a language barrier we could survive [barring medical conditions- but the actual practical knowledge is actually there.]
Did any cultures actually wander at random, as a matter of usual behavior, as opposed to moving between known sites? That is, I expect that groups were occasionally driven out of known territory by flood or volcano or so on, and by other groups; and I expect that people occasionally went out to explore; but I’d expect that people would move mostly through known territory. Current nomads do, don’t they? and for that matter social groups, and often individuals, of other species? Travelling at random sounds very dangerous to me – you’d have no idea where the next good water was, where to find the next clump of fruit trees coming ripe, where the bears usually denned, whether the people over the next hill would trade with you or try to murder you.
Your answer makes total sense. The generally accepted idea is that cultures were originally nomadic, and some still are. Some then stayed within known landscapes, moving between seasonal resources, or even staying still. These tended to be hunter-gatherer, although they manipulated the landscape to improve plant production, in particular with fire. These are mobile cultures, like most Australian Aboriginal tribes, although it is now thought that some of the southern tribes had permanent settlements. As to whether that is farming or not is an argument on semantics.
There are well-known cultures who were permanently settled, but still hunter-gatherer, such as the Poverty Point cultures who built the massive semi-circular mounds and timber circles in Louisiana. It all depends on available resources.
I haven’t studied nomadic tribes because they mightn’t use the memory methods I was looking at, and are pretty few anyway. Being in Australia, my primary instruction came from Aboriginal cultures. Maybe no tribes ever actually wandered without direction, but some certainly moved to new locations, hence adapting to the whole world. Lots of interesting research for someone to do!
Nomadic in the sense of just generally wandering around at random?
Do any of the other primates even behave like that? It was my impression that each group has a territory; though I’m certainly not an expert in the field.
We could easily have spread around the world without random wandering having ever been a normal group behavior, by a combination of two things: one being groups being occasionally forced out of known territory as I said above; and the other being groups splitting due to increased population and/or disagreements within them, with one group moving into nearby territory that wasn’t entirely strange because it had been partly explored by hunting parties, the curious, and/or scouts deliberately sent out to look for additional good areas to live in.
Lynne, what do you think of “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later,” says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. “You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.” and ““Göbekli Tepe changes everything”.[2][43] If indeed the site was built by hunter-gatherers as some researchers believe then it would mean that the ability to erect monumental complexes was within the capacities of these sorts of groups which would overturn previous assumptions. Some researchers believe that the construction of Göbekli Tepe may have contributed to the later development of urban civilization.” by Ian Hodder
Professor
Dunlevie Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Within the limits of accuracy we have for dating the first human settlement of Australia and the Americas, the big two cleanskin continents, the first entering group only needs to expand their range one 1 kilometre per year to reach the far end within 10-15,000 years, which is a pretty relaxed speed of expansion and exploration.
And as humans expanded their range they trailed behind networks of language, kinship, culture, ancestry and shared experience they could use to create the sorts of conceptual networks Lynne is talking about [and sticking big rocks together if they felt like it].
As an aside William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, wrote another far less well-known book, The Inheritors which to me remains the best expression of the early modern human experience.
This arouses my memory of The Ballad of Lost C’Mell’s leader of the underpeople, E’telekeli. Cordwainer Smith may display inspiration there.
They are paid for that, usually. 
I was once a part-time busker with guitar and voice supplementing my ill-paid employment. My repertoire of ~1200 songs written by others and ~300 of my own relieved me of boredom. I set no music stand at street corners; my memory palace was the interplay of fingerings and pickings (muscle memory) and rhyme hints.
And that was a spare-time endeavor. Working musicians memorize much more, often with extreme precision in four dimensions per hand and throat.
This is the first time in several years on this board that I’ve come across another reader of Cordwainer Smith.
There’s more about C’mell and E’telekeli in Cordwainer Smith’s only full novel, Norstrilia. (Norstrilia being a planet named after North Australia.) Now I have to go and re-read it.
I agree that the old ideas of hunter-gatherer-fishers being unable to construct monuments is no longer valid. I have read a lot of Hodder’s work, and the excavations at Catalhoyuk are fascinating. But I am surprised that he claims this changes everything. There are well known hunter-gatherer societies able to live in complex knowledge groupings.
In my doctoral research, I visited Poverty Point in Louisiana to work with the archaeologist there. There is not much to see now, but the Poverty Point culture built massive mound structures. They also had timber circles which were not buildings - just like in the European Neolithic. They had just found some post holes when I was there and I predicted timber circles. They had no stone, so there couldn’t be stone circles. They had found 21 timber circles at Poverty Point when I last heard, so I was totally chuffed!
Native American Woodland cultures like at Cahokia in Missouri also had mounds and timber circles but were not hunter-gatherer.
My concern is the attempt to link the ability of constructing monuments to farming. I think they are linked to cultures which are settling and non-literate - hence the need for large ceremonial sites with memory palaces. Mounds and timber circles serve those purposes beautifully. Also, all these sites have apparently non-utilitatiran decorated objects which I have shown work as handheld mnemonic devices. Indigenous cultures use a combination of all these mnemonic technologies.
So my feeling is that these monuments are a sign of a culture needing mnemonic technologies, whether hunter-gatherer or early farming. Once the society gets large and there are hierarchies build on wealth and violence, knowledge is no longer the primary source of power and you get the knowledge elite serving the big guys - such as the Druids. The changes can be seen in the archaeology, especially in the UK. I spent time with archaeologist and Stonehenge expert, Dr Ros Cleal, and we looked at how the memory devices would change as the Iron Age brought in wealthy grave goods including weapons, and took the sequence on to the Druids. The archaeology shows the power changes and loss of the materially egalitarian ways of smaller hunter-gatherer societies.
So my conclusion is that there is no surprise in Gobekli Tepe being a monumental site built by hunter-gatherers.
But until my ideas are more fully tested by academics and archaeologists, then they are still a bit speculative, despite the support I have already had - and lack of opposition. New ideas take time (and rightly so).
Does that make sense?
I agree totally. I wonder if the term ‘nomadic’ will stop being used for modern human societies. But I have not looked at the cultures which are referred to as ‘nomadic’, so I can’t say anything mroe than what you say makes sense.