The scene of some of humanity's oldest constructions raises a whole list of questions, writes Sara Keen.
When you're standing in a car park littered with shards of obsidian, you know you're in a special place. These shards are the offcuts of ancient toolmaking and there are so many of them we have no choice but to walk on them.
We're in southeast Turkey at Gobekli Tepe (aka Potbelly Hill), the world's oldest occupied Neolithic site and I'm bursting with excitement at seeing what has been discovered here. I love exploring ancient sites, the oldest visited so far being Stonehenge. This site is 7000 years older.
It's only a short walk to the site which, a year or two back, was roofed over with boardwalks high above the actual diggings. As soon as we look down on the archaeological dig, we are blown away by what we see: huge T-shaped, bas-relief decorated pillars, erected in circles. The statistics for this site are staggering.
It was occupied between 9500BC and 8200BC and some of the pillars weigh as much as 16 tonnes and stand 5.5m high. They were carved from a nearby limestone quarry, hauled to the site, and stood up. Some pillars are still in situ at the quarry, partially carved, lying down and waiting to be finished before being moved to the site. This is all at a time before the wheel, beasts of burden, writing, metal or pottery.
Most of the pillars were held erect by walls of shaped blocks, held together with clay mortar. Two pillars in the centre of the circles were notched into a huge stone. The archaeologists had carefully removed the blocks and put them in order on platforms, then braced the pillars with timber props. We can look down on the excavations and, although the props and deconstructed stone walls obscure some of the pillars, we can see their bas-reliefs. Humans are represented, as well as numerous animals and birds, including ducks, gazelles, lions, bulls, boars and snakes.
We can thank Klaus Schmidt, of the German Archaeological Institute, for finding this site. In the mid-1990s, Schmidt was wandering the hills about 14km from the nearby city of Sanliurfa, when he spotted the huge number of obsidian chips from volcanic material not available locally. Something worth investigating, he thought. Within a year he had a team together, moved on to the site and within minutes of starting excavating, they discovered a highly decorated stone pillar followed by many more. Schmidt soon realised a workforce of several hundred must have been needed to prepare and move the stone pillars, make blocks and build walls.
The people who created this site came from a society that lived in small groups, who foraged for plants and hunted wild animals. One has to wonder whether these people were happy to band together in such a large group and do the work voluntarily, or were they slaves who had no choice?Another issue is that there is no evidence of anyone having lived there, but lack of evidence of houses doesn't mean that no-one lived there, as a typical hunter-gatherer society lived in shelters made of non-permanent materials. Still, if people were onsite for a long time, it's a mystery there's no evidence of something a little more permanent, such as stone walls. There's also no evidence of cooking fires, the only evidence of eating being a large number of bones of gazelles, pigs, geese, deer and aurochs, a now extinct wild ox.
Perhaps they were fed by others who found food from afar and brought it to the site.
Schmidt's team was away when we visited, so we were able to spend some time wandering the boardwalks, looking down on different parts of the excavation and wondering how it all fitted together. An article in National Geographic considers it could have been the birth of religion. It is clearly monumental architecture on a grand scale, similar to Stonehenge, but there are no rough-cut stone blocks here. These pillars have been smoothed and beautifully crafted. Could the animals carved into the pillars represent something to be worshipped? What do the circles represent? Were the two largest pillars in the middle a place for offerings? So many unanswered questions.
And yet there's more. The whole site is about 9ha and it has been discovered that after a while the rings lost their appeal and were filled in with limestone fragments, stone vessels and tools, even animal and human bones. This might account for the absence of evidence of domestic dwellings, as their walls might have been used as fill. They then built new ones, slightly less sophisticated than the previous. This went on for centuries, with the last circles containing pillars that were much smaller and simpler than the first, and erected with far less care.
Eventually we dragged ourselves away from the main site and wandered around the hill. Geophysical surveys show there are 16 more sites and with only 5% or so of the site excavated there's plenty of work ahead. Unfortunately, Schmidt died last year but, hopefully, his work will continue. There are plans for a museum, and to make the whole area an archaeological park. There is no entry fee (yet) but they are already working on a boardwalk from the car park to the diggings. Turkey has applied to the United Nations to recognise the site with World Heritage status. It's in the ''pending'' basket at this moment.
As we crunch our way back over the shards of obsidian again, we reluctantly leave this wonderful place, a highlight of our travels around Turkey.
Sara Keen is a Dunedin travel writer.
