Mesolithic mystery

 

I don´t know the real name for this documentary (there are several docus about the same topic with similar-sounding names). On YouTube it´s called "Ancient History Documentaries - Gobekli Tepe". It was made in 2012. And yes, it´s Göbekli Tepe all over again!

Göbekli Tepe is an ancient mound in Asia Minor (today Turkey) where archeological excavations have revealed the existence of a mysterious Mesolithic culture, which was "too advanced" for its time. Indeed, it seems to have been several thousand of years before schedule! During the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age, people were still hunters and gatherers (although they were not always nomadic). No agriculture existed, the wheel hadn´t been invented yet, nor were any animals domesticated. And yet, at Göbekli Tepe, the local culture built relatively large temples with carved animal and human figures. The site is dated to around 11,500 years BP.

One of the archeologists featured believes that about 50 people could build a temple of this kind in six months or a year. If so, they must have returned every year to build another one, since several temple structures have been excavated at the site. Also, an additional crew of people must have provided the builders with food and drink. This suggests a more sophisticated organization (and division of labor) than hitherto expected from a hunter-and-gatherer culture. The archeologists theorize that perhaps agriculture was developed in response to a pre-existing proto-civilization, rather than the other way around (civilization becoming possible only after agriculture was firmly established). A strange feature of Göbekli Tepe is that the builders succesively buried the temples, only to erect new but smaller ones on top. Over a period of 1000 years, each new temple was thus smaller than its predecessor. Why? Nobody really knows. Did the temple cult lose in importance as people turned to agriculture at the dawn of the Neolithic? There are more simple temple structures in settlements around Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that the cult may have been decentralized at some point.

Since the temple builders didn´t have any script, all interpretations of their religion remain highly speculative. The archeologists interviewed believe that the T-shaped pillars symbolize humans, and therefore the dominion of humanity over nature and its animals (since there are animals carved at the pillars). But the pillars are not anthropomorphic, something also pointed out in the documentary. There is also a carved headless man on one of the pillars. Perhaps we are dealing with a cult of the ancestors, symbolized by severed heads? Is the headless man a god waiting to be resurrected? You can speculate like this all you like, and never come to any firm conclusion...

Göbekli Tepe is a perhaps a problem for those (like myself) who (in my case cynically) believe that human history is driven by material or "materialist" factors. It´s easy to understand how, say, climate change can force hunters and gatherers to invent agriculture, and how this at some later point makes possible (or even necessary) some kind of more complex society. It´s not as easy to understand how purely ideological factors could lead Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to build a temple complex devoted to a new religion of hominid dominion, and then *this* leads to agriculture as a by-product. But then, perhaps the relation between "base" and "superstructure" was more fluid at the end of the "last" Ice Age?

Göbekli Tepe has (of course) also been the topic of much "alternative" speculation, most notably from Graham Hancock in his book "Magicians of the Gods", where the mystery mound is taken to be another piece of evidence for the existence of a lost civilization á la Atlantis. Regardless of what you might think of this angle, Göbekli Tepe does show that it only takes one dig to rewrite our history books (or "pre-history" in this case), so who knows what else might be waiting to be unearthed...