What is Gobekli Tepe? (Klaus Schmidt, TEDx)

Klaus Schmidt (TEDx Prague, 7/8/14); Pat Macpherson, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

What is Goebekli Tepe | Klaus Schmidt | TEDxPrague

(TEDx Talks) July 8, 2014. "Potbelly Hill" or "Pregnant Mound" (Göbekli Tepe) Göbekli Tepe (Turkish [ɟœbecˈli teˈpe] [2], "Potbelly Hill," [3] known as Girê Mirazan or Xirabreşkê in Kurdish [4]) is a Neolithic archeological site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, between Europe and Asia.

Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between circa 9500 and 8000 BCE, the site is comprised of a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars – the world's oldest known megaliths.

Many of these pillars are richly decorated with figurative anthropomorphic details, clothing, and reliefs of wild animals, providing archeologists rare insights into prehistoric religion and the particular iconography of the period.

The 50 foot (15 meter) high, 20-acre (8 hectare) tell ("mound") also includes many smaller rectangular buildings, quarries, and stone-cut cisterns from the Neolithic, as well as some traces of activity from later periods.

The site was first used at the dawn of the Southwest Asian Neolithic period, which marked the appearance of the oldest permanent human settlements anywhere in the world.

Prehistorians link this Neolithic Revolution to the advent of agriculture but disagree on whether farming caused people to settle down or vice versa.

Göbekli Tepe is a monumental complex built on the top of a rocky mountaintop, with no clear evidence of agricultural cultivation produced to date. It has played a prominent role in this debate.

The site's original excavator, German archeologist Klaus Schmidt, described it as the "world's first temple": a sanctuary used by groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers from a wide area, with few or no permanent inhabitants.

Other archeologists have challenged this interpretation, arguing that the evidence for a lack of agriculture and a resident population was far from conclusive. Recent research has also led the current excavators of Göbekli Tepe to revise or abandon many of the conclusions underpinning Schmidt's interpretation [1]. More

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