Introduction
Göbekli Tepe, located in modern-day Turkey, stands as a monumental testament to the ingenuity and social complexity of Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) hunter-gatherers. This archaeological site, dating back to around 9500 BCE, challenges conventional theories about the origins of agriculture and societal development. It is known for its large circular structures that contain large stone pillars - among the world's oldest known megaliths. Many of these pillars are decorated with anthropomorphic details, clothing, and sculptural reliefs of wild animals, providing archaeologists insights into prehistoric religion and the iconography of the period. Contrary to popular theory, 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. This article explores the agriculture, population, and diet of the people who built and used Göbekli Tepe, shedding light on their way of life and the factors that may have led to the dawn of agriculture.
Challenging the Standard Archaeological Model
The standard archaeological model posits that agriculture led to increased food production, higher population densities, sedentary lifestyles, and the emergence of complex societies. The adoption of agriculture, thus, created a resource base capable of sustaining high population densities and an extensive division of labor. It also generated the capacity to produce ‘surplus’ to support craftsmen, priests, and rulers. However, Göbekli Tepe presents an inverted sequence of events.
Göbekli Tepe was a major religious and ritual center. It periodically gathered together people from a fairly large-scale society. Constructing the monument and carving the pillars required hundreds of workers and artisans laboring together, so the supporting society had to number in the thousands, at the very least. Its capacity for generating surplus had to be limited, because the society that built Göbekli Tepe subsisted by hunting and gathering. The earliest complex at Göbekli Tepe was built roughly at 9600 BCE, while the first evidence of agriculture in the area dates to at least one thousand years later.
The Hunter-Gatherer Diet at Göbekli Tepe
The workers at the site ate game - gazelles and aurochs - probably supplemented by gathered plant foods. The presence of large animal bones at the site supports the idea that animals killed in far-away hunts were brought to the site to feed workers. Butchered bones found in large numbers from the local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse from food hunted and cooked or otherwise prepared for the congregants. However, recent archaeobotanical research suggests that plant consumption was more significant than previously thought.
Evidence of Cereal Processing and Early Proto-Farming
Tools such as grinding stones, mortars, and pestles found at the site have been analyzed and suggest considerable cereal processing. Over 7,000 grinding stones have been found, spanning the entirety of the site's usage, which are suggested to have been used to process cereal based on phytoliths found in associated soil. Laura Dietrich's experiments with replica grindstones have demonstrated that the people at Göbekli Tepe were mostly grinding grain coarsely, just enough to break up its tough outer layer of bran and make it easy to boil and eat as porridge or ferment into beer.
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Dietrich argues the ‘barbecue and beer’ interpretation is way off. The sheer number of grain-processing tools at Göbekli Tepe suggest that even before farming took hold, cereals were a daily staple, not just part of an occasional fermented treat. This challenges the initial interpretations that focused on meat consumption and occasional beer-drinking during celebrations.
The Role of Feasting and Social Complexity
Klaus Schmidt hypothesized that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a “full scale revolution,” where large bands of people worked together to protect their newly cultivated wheat from intruding animals, such as gazelles and wild donkeys.
With so many people gathering at Göbekli Tepe they now had other needs for their food supply, and maybe they are managing and manipulating the natural strands of grasses for cereals and animals like cattle and pig, sheep and goat, and starting this domestication to have more influence on their food supply. There had been big feasting at the site during the construction, so the hunter gatherers were coming here for a big feast, a big party, and this party provided the manpower to do all this work, but, of course, for this feasting you need a lot of food . Domestication had originally been in connection with feasting. So the feasting and the need for a good food supply were influencing the domestication.
Göbekli Tepe and the Domestication of Wheat
The origins of domesticated wheat can be traced exactly here to this region. All the cultivated wheat has some fingerprints which match the fingerprint that the wild forms of wheat have in this region. It's getting quite clear that the same people who were building Göbekli Tepe were the same people who were domesticating the wheat.
Avi Gopher believes that the agricultural revolution did not take generations but that hunter-gatherers who settled chose plants with high germination rates to cultivate. "Hunter-gatherers had hundreds of thousands of years of experience with the plants around them," Gopher says. Early crops that existed throughout the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent (between Euphrates and Tigris rivers) are scattered, but in southeast Türkiye one can find all of them.
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Population Size and Social Organization
Constructing the monument and carving the pillars required hundreds of workers and artisans laboring together, so the supporting society had to number in the thousands, at the very least. The high level of social organization needed to build such a massive site is surprising because we expected for this period that the people had been living in very simple social conditions, but now it is looking very different.
The End of Göbekli Tepe and the Rise of Agriculture
After the Neolithic Revolution, when the people surrounding Göbekli Tepe became full time farmers, the new pillars at Göbekli Tepe began to shrink in size, and then, eventually, the site fizzled away into obscurity. In this period of the 9th millennium everything is reduced. In 8,000 BC, everything is abandoned. The people had become farmers.
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tags: #goblecki #tepe #agriculture #population #diet