You missed my point, but that’s OK because I have a new theory. Drawing conclusions about events in the distance past based on little to no evidence is not a good idea and it’s remotely possible that just maybe many such conclusions will be overturned each time new evidence is discovered.
Yes, but the distinction is that the cult dies with the founder, or at most with his immediate successor, if that person is also charismatic. I’m wondering if these monuments could have been built during one person’s life and then abandoned.
Actually there is a large amount of clear and consistent evidence.
It’s the nature of science that any theory may be overturned when new evidence comes along. At the moment this theory is accepted by most scientists and experts in prehistory, whether you happen to like it or not.
It’s a speculative theory. Interesting for discussion, hardly anything to draw broad conclusions from. Mostly what these finds do is set back the date for the ‘earliest’ events, they don’t tell us much else clearly. We’ve seen the dates, purpose, builders, and source of stone for Stonehenge change repeatedly. We glean a few useful facts about the particular site discovered but it doesn’t tell us much about the life of humans elsewhere at that time. Their could have been large civilizations of permanently settled people at the same time who relied on wood and mud and the evidence will never be found. This is a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing and no readily identifiable edge pieces.
I don’t need *any *of that to know that thinking hunter-gatherers were considered incapable of complex construction at the time Göbekli Tepe was being excavated is ignorance, no matter who makes it. But hey, cool argument from authority, though.
Not me, the teams there saying they’ve found no sign.
Because I’m happy to believe they’re absolutely *stellar *field archaeologists while not being all that great at the anthropology interpretation part of it. As evidenced by their seeming ignorance of other sedentary HG cultures.
Gosh, it’s almost like I said something similar …
…which would overturn the idea of them being a temple complex, which would mean…suddenly religion doesn’t precede settlement, which would mean…suddenly everything* isn’t *changed? 
And if they were houses, they’d have all the other stuff houses had - the hearths, the trash pits, the burials. They don’t. But what they do have, are the characteristics of other roughly contemporaneous PPNA/B non-domestic buildings that are associated with easily-identifiable houses, like the cultic complex at Nevalı Çori or the 3 cult buildings at Çayönü. We know what *their *houses looked like. We know what *their *cult buildings looked like. The buildings at Göbekli Tepe look like their cult buildings, not their houses.
You expect us to believe they *started off *living in buildings exactly like the temples, then later moved to living in simpler houses? And they built their later temples to look like their old houses because…? Nostalgia? :dubious:
No. From the NatGeo article I linked earlier:
This also destroys the argument that it was a city because it is big. It is like finding a landfill and thinking “Boy, that must have been a big party!”.
Argument from authority? Cites? Facts? That’s* exactly* what General Questions is.
I still want your reply, what makes you think you know better than :
Ian Hodder
Professor
Dunlevie Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Ph.D. Cambridge, 1974 Among his publications are: Symbols in Action (Cambridge 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge 1986), The Domestication of Europe (Oxford 1990), The Archaeological Process (Oxford 1999). Catalhoyuk: The Leopard’s Tale (Thames and Hudson 2006), and Entangled. An archaeology of the relationhips between humans and things (Wiley and Blackwell, 2012). Professor Hodder has been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey since 1993.
A Stanford Professor, PhD from Cambridge, with at least four major books published in the field, who has been actually out there digging in Turkey for 15 years.
What’s your qualifications? Where are your cites?
Another point about GT site is - no article really mentions the origin of the stones. Did they find chunks of stone lying about and dress them? Did they actually quarry them from the local bedrock, (*Meet the modern stone age family…*♫) have the tech to split 15-foot chunks out of solid rock? Were they dragged a long distance?
Also fascinating -they “filled in” the circles? Even back in Roman times (or later) the area beside the Jerusalem Temple was filled in using stone arches since that was cheaper than hauling the equivalent amount of rubble from elsewhere. Filling in one of those circles must have been a fairly hefty amount of work. The problem with large gatherings in the pre-agricultural times means that attendees either stripped the neighbourhood bare in no time, or had to carry in significant amounts of food or travel mighty far for their next feast.
the excavations of GT specifically mention no settlement found, but a LOT of animal bones.
IMHO - IANAArchaeologist - a defining factor for “city” is a large settlement of relative permanence. Permanent occupation gave the incentive to build more permanent structures. Seasonal structures would need significant cleaning and repairs each year - at a certain point, too large or complex a building is not worth it.
They did find quarries nearby.iirc
City and town are pretty interchangeable. In the UK, ‘City’ is a status granted by the monarch and there are examples of small cities (Ely) and large towns (Northampton). In other parts of the world, towns title themselves as cities to give themselves more status.
I guess you go from hamlet to village to town.
How does that work? Assuming we in the USA were still with you guys, does Levy, Arkansas (cesspool of the world, armpit of the South) write a Letter to Elizabeth II and request to become a city instead of a town?
The area is made of limestone. From the NatGeo article:
From the Smithsonan article:
Currently, in the U.S. each state has its own regulations for and definitions of what makes cities, towns, and villages. They are formally incorporated by state law. (Which is why a city attorney is its corporation counsel.) (And why areas outside these boundaries are called unincorporated districts.)
These definitions have exactly nothing in common with the way archaeologists use the terms. They are arbitrary and there are 50 of them. I’m assuming that each nation has its own set of equally arbitrary definitions and rules.
Think of “city” as a scientific term that lives in a different world from the common meaning, similar to theory, paradigm, chaos, and countless others.
I merely have undergrad arcaeology. Not that that matters.
I’ve referenced 3 HG cultures in this thread, any of which would give the lie to the naive idea that HGs were just small roaming bands incapable of building anything monumental. Do you *really *need cites for the existence of any of them, or what they were capable of? One of them was right in the Levant, even.
Not to archaeologists, urban planners or anthropologists - and while there’s a continuum, even in common parlance there’s generally a differentiationto be made.
In the UK, it *used *to be that a city had a cathedral, a town didn’t. That’s why small Ely is a city. That went by the wayside, though, and just royal proclamation was all that counted. But that definition isn’t really useful in the Levant, now is it?
Archaeologists usually use some variant of Childe’s 10 criteria, :
[ol]
[li]increased settlement size, [/li][li]concentration of wealth, [/li][li]large-scale public works, [/li][li]writing, [/li][li]representational art, [/li][li]knowledge of science and engineering, [/li][li]foreign trade, [/li][li]full-time specialists in nonsubsistence activities, [/li][li]class-stratified society,[/li][li]political organization based on residence rather than kinship.[/li][/ol]
That’s overlain nowadays with the functional definition concept, where cities are defined in terms of the services they provide hinterlands, as not all archaeological cities meet all Childe’s criteria.
Well, I am convinced that there was nothing around that could qualify as a city by either than definition or having tens of thousands of people. It would be highly out of context with everything we know about the period and there would have been a lot of evidence still. I don’t really believe any line of cultural descent to Sumer and the other Mesopotamian civilizations is probable, besides the most fundamental. The intervening time period is way too long.
I am not convinced we can state with any certainty that there was no group who lived permanently at or near the site. A small group of permanent specialists does not seem a reach. We have excavated too little of the site to be certain, and presumably started excavations at the most visible remains. Also, Göbekli Tepe is situated on a hill with views of every direction. Any humans would most likely have settled near a water source. Permanent residence does not man stone houses. I think archeologists would have to be marvelously lucky to find the remains of a small permanent camp near a river or similar water source that may possibly have flooded occasionally over eleven thousand years of climate variety. Also under ten thousand years of debris.
I am quite unconvinced that Göbekli Tepe wasn’t closely involved in the origins of agriculture. It is too on the nose in location and time. I’d expect any small permanent resident group may have had periods when they needed to rely on other food sources than hunting, and after a few cases of that may have made it a permanent practice. There is no evidence that the buildings didn’t come first though.
So anyway, I was doing some reading around, and came across a National Geographic articleon the site. And towards the end of the piece, Klaus Schmidt the archeologist in charge of the work, says he is not at all certain they have reached the bottom layer!
So… it could be even older?
What has that to do with my cites? Do anyone disagree with the Stanford Professor?
It’s kinda difficult to disagree with questions, speculation, and opinions. Got any actual science backing your position? Or is appeal to authority your only case?
I’m 104 years old. I remember in my youth when this was a happening place.