What is Göbekli Tepe | Klaus Schmidt | TEDxPrague

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED conferences.
Klaus Schmidt (1953-2014) was a German archaeologist who lead the excavations at the site of Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, from 1996. In this TEDx talk in Prague, which he gave shortly before his sudden death in 2014, he offers an overview about the importance of Göbekli Tepe, one of the most astounding sites in the history of archaeology. Göbekli Tepe is the most ancient example of the neolithic transition when hunters-gatherers stopped their nomadic way of life and settled down to become agrarian societies.

Ladies and gentlemen,

now we are going
a little bit under the surface,

we are coming to archeology
and to a project

which is one of the most important
projects of the last years.

Those are not only my words,
- I am the director of this project -

but it is internationally told like this.

It's a project in southeastern Turkey,
the site called Göbekli Tepe.

Göbekli Tepe means 'mound with belly.'

It's just its name,
an old name from the map.

We didn't invent this name, but it shows
a little bit, or it's recognizable -

we've some natural limestone plateau here

and all this mound which is not
a natural mound but an artificial mound,

this is the belly on the mound
explaining the name.

The project is done
by the German Archeological Institute

where I come from too,

but in close cooperation
with the local authorities,

especially the General Directorate
for Antiquities in Ankara,

and the University of Sanliurfa,
the Harran University,

and some other institutions,

mainly responsible for the conservation
and the restoration of the site.

For the scientific work, we have financing
mainly from the German Research Foundation

which is financing the project,
which is a long-term project.

We are now in the 20th year of work,

and we hope to continue
for many, many years in the future.

Okay, that's the framing.
I have to say all this:

who are the institutions

and who is giving money
for our work at the site.

But what is the importance of this site?

At first, I already
showed you this location.

It's a huge limestone ridge,

and this artificial mound is on top of it.

Such artificial mounds are
very common in the Near East

They are called 'tell' in Arabic language

or 'tepe' or 'höyük' in Turkish language.

I think some will know 'Çatalhöyük, '

an old Neolithic site in central Anatolia,

and Göbekli is a site like this,
but it has some specifics,

it's a unique site because it's much older
than all the other ones.

It belongs to the 10th
and 9th millennium BC.

So, it means, roughly spoken,
some monuments there are 12,000 years old,

12,000 before today, or 10,000,
the 10th millennium BC.

That's just after the Ice Age.

Who knows a bit about geology, knows
that the Ice Age was a global phenomenon.

Now, with the ice corings in Greenland,
we can date it very, very exactly.

It was not a long process,
the end of the Ice Age.

It was what we call
a rapid climate change.

A very rapid development, around 9,600.

And that's the time when
the building activity at Göbekli started.

I told you, an artificial mound made
by humans by erecting buildings,

walls, and other things above each other.

So, the mound was created.

This is not so special in the Near East,
but, as I told you, the time frame,

10th-9th millennium, that's very strange.

We didn't expect it in this time,

when all over the world, people
were still hunter-gatherers,

that they had been able
to produce such buildings,

to do such huge work and much more.

We will see some examples
of the world of Göbekli Tepe,

which is such an unexpected
and unknown world before.

Many say Göbekli Tepe
is changing the history.

That's not true,
it's not changing it,

but it's adding a very important chapter
to the history of humanity,

a chapter we didn't know
that it existed before.

And this chapter is about the transition
from hunter-gatherers societies

to farming, to food-producing societies.

This is a form of subsistence

that our basis agrarian societies
are still based on,

and this was invented
in this region at this time.

This region is the Near East.

We will see some maps later.

And here, about the mound, an aerial view.

When we started the project in '95,
what we could see

was nearly nothing,
just trees and fields.

It was used for agriculture
by the local people,

but the surface [findings]
had been showing us

very clearly the importance of the site,

and the dating by diagnostic
flint tools and other tools.

Pottery is not existent, not yet invented.

So, we call this stage in archeology
the pre-pottery Neolithic culture,

before the invention of pottery,
but it's the beginning of the Neolithic.

The Neolithic period means
food producing period in our terms.

To understand the importance
of Göbekli Tepe

we have to enlarge
our frame to a global view

On this map in red you see all the regions
in the world where this transition

from hunter-gatherer cultures
to food-producing cultures

happened independently from each other.

We have some regions in Meso-America,
South America, in the South-East,

and, of course you are right, this are
the numbers BC written about some.

In Africa very late in comparison
to this core area in the Near East

where the transition
happened around 9,000,

or late 10th, early 9th millennium.

The region, in the long time, we call
the Fertile Crescent of the Near East

because in the South
we have the Arabian desert,

to the North the Mountains of the Taurus
and the Zagros Mountains.

This is the area with
the most favorable climatic conditions,

the most favorable geographic conditions:
the Fertile Crescent.

for a long time, we thought
that the western wing was important

regarding the development
of earlier agrarian civilizations,

but now we understand, through research
not only by our team, but by many teams,

and in the national groups of American,
French, British, Turkish, Italian,

Japanese, German, and other archaeologists
working in this region,

we understand that there is

something like a Golden Triangle
within this Fertile Crescent

where the most important
things are going on.

And Göbekli Tepe is located
in the Golden Triangle,

and it has a very important role.

We will see some of the monuments
that we are excavating there.

The other sites marked here in red belong
to this time, to the 10th-9th millennium,

but these are settlements of this period.

Settlements of settled hunters-gatherers.

It was a new discovery of 20-25 years ago,

that we already have
settled hunters-gatherers.

We thought that hunters-gatherers
are always nomadic, but in this region

they changed their life already
before the invention of food-producing.

Göbekli Tepe is not a settlement.

It belongs to it, but is only a sanctuary,
or many sanctuaries together.

We'll see examples.

Neolithic, just to have an idea
of what it means: from wild to domestic.

Mainly here from wild to domestic cereals,
they are getting much bigger.

With animals it's a little more difficult,

which is the reason why only four animals
had been domesticated.

That's a beginning:
goat, sheep, cattle, and pig.

We exclude the dog; it was domesticated
earlier, by the hunters-gatherers already.

But it's a different story,

it was domesticated not
for meat production,

but to be the fellow of the hunters.

But this means Neolithic societies,
food-producing societies,

on the base of domesticated species,
plants, and animals.

Our prediction that this site
of Göbekli Tepe is so important

was completely fulfilled
during the excavations.

Here the excavation work in an aerial view
from 2011 with several areas.

And there are many findings,
like these flint tools; very common.

Or findings like sculptures.

The flints are known from everywhere,

but not such large-scale sculptures

like these ones or composite monuments

like this totem pole sculpture
with several elements on top:

maybe a lion, here an eye, an ear,
and below a human and another human.

A very exciting composition and an art,
which we didn't know before,

which is challenging
our ability to interpret.

And the most important
monumental architecture

- sorry, I'm mixing here -
monumental architecture:

mainly ovals or circles with pillars,
delineated by pillars.

Two of the pillars are very big ones,
always in the center,

and the pillars always T-shaped.

This strange T-shape we can understand

- here another view of these enclosures:
the surrounding oval with some T-shapes

which are smaller, and the central pillars
here, the T-shapes.

Fortunately, we can understand
the meaning of these T-shapes,

which at first seem a little bit strange.

Highly stylized humans are depicted

because in some cases
we have arms depicted,

we have the hands, the fingers,
and some parts of garment are depicted.

So, the T-shapes are stylized humans,
and very often in Göbekli Tepe

we have animals depicted
like attributes on the T-shapes.

The T-shapes are unique in history.

We don't have T-shapes
in the Palaeolithic period before,

we don't have them after
the time of Göbekli Tepe,

which ends with the 9th millennium.

There are just some very rough comparisons
like the 'taulas' in Menorca,

but this is a very different function,
a very different meaning.

It's really a table: 'taula' means table.

These are tables, no connection
with the T-shapes of Göbekli Tepe.

These T-shapes are so important

because looking back
to the upper Palaeolithic art

like Lascaux, Altamira, or the recently
discovered caves of Chauvet or Cosquer:

here the animals are always dominant,
the animals are at the center.

In Göbekli now we have the human form,
being the superior form, and it's clear:

there is a connection with
the phenomenon of domestication

because now the human is the boss,

and the animals are reduced
to attributes of the humans.

Some impressions of the excavations

of these circles, of these enclosures,

here for example with in situ,
in original position, the central pillars

with a height of 5.50 meters
on top of the original floor.

We didn't erect anything.
It's all found in its original position.

We are really very lucky
to have the chance

to excavate such an exciting,
such an important site like Göbekli Tepe.

This is unique, there is no parallel,
there is no comparison.

We have contemporaneous sites
as I told you, but they don't have

this kind of monumental art
and monumental pillars.

Very often we have combinations
of motives depicted.

They are very rich, showing
a narrative character,

showing that we have
illustrations of stories

of mythological stories in front of us.

And even more, when we look to this part,

we have objects of unknown function,

but we have animals: a bird,
a quadruped, a reptile, a frog.

And such an association together
with the objects is very similar

to things we know, for example,

from old Egypt, 4th millennium
Egypt, on slate palettes.

So started the Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing in the same way.

The sign of city and animals added to it,
but in Göbekli Tepe it came to its end.

There was no continuation.

Unfortunately, Göbekli
had been completely abandoned

for unknown reasons so far.

In Egypt, from these beginnings

the invention of the hieroglyphic
writing started.

Göbekli Tepe is part of this story,
but with a big interruption.

Here we have the image being an image,
we have the transformation into what

in German we call the Bildzeichen,
and from these Bildzeichen other signs

are developing, and here
we are coming to our letter alpha or A.

You can easily understand it.

But this is a discontinuation
of many thousands years

between Göbekli Tepe around 9,000

and the invention
of true writing around 3,000.

There are at least 6,000 years
of a gap we tried to fill,

but for the moment,
we don't know how to fill it.

But we want to continue our work.

Hopefully young colleagues
will continue the research

on this very exciting period of mankind.

One colleague said - it's not from me -

"Göbekli Tepe seems to be

the most smoking gun
in archeology at the moment".

I think it's really true because we have
so many unexpected new results,

which are changing
our ability to interpret.

And we can see, reconstruct that there
was something like a cultist community.

Göbekli Tepe with its sanctuaries
[was] no settlement,

but [there were] settlements
around Göbekli Tepe.

And our zoologists can recognize

from the archaeofauna,
from the animal bones,

discovered in Göbekli and the other sites,

that the early domestication of cattle

was done on the Syrian Euphrates,
sheep on the Turkish Euphrates,

goat in the Taurus Mountains,
and pig in the Tigris basin.

Independently from each other,
but very quickly.

All these discoveries, these inventions
had been brought together

to what we call the Neolithic package.

This Neolithic package enables people
to be superior to their neighbours,

to those neighbors
that are still being hunters-gatherers.

Now the farming way of life was invented,

and was spreading all over Europe.

We saw this map at the beginning

with the distribution
of this new way of life.

How did people come to Göbekli Tepe?

How do you bring a lot of people there

to be able to erect
this monumental architecture?

Of course not just by saying:
"Hello, come and we work", no.

Feasting. Big feasting.

We can expect big feasting
to have happened at the mound,

so people came there and so they had
the power for working events on the side.

We have a lot of experimental archeology

on how to move monoliths,
on how to move big stones.

But we fortunately also have
some authentic photos from Indonesia

done by European travelers,

showing how megaliths
are being actually moved

for the construction
of the tomb of a king.

We can be very sure
in Göbekli Tepe it was looking similar.

This in short a story

which is just a rough framing
of a story of results.

Not only my results: this is teamwork.

Archeology usually is teamwork,

including local workers
from the nearby villages,

including students from Europe and Turkey,

including scientists, specialists

in archaeofauna, botany, and other things.

We will try to continue for many years

and to answer many
of the still open questions

about this unexpected
and exciting world of hunters-gatherers,

who changed to become farmers,
and who changed the world history.

Thank you.

(Applause)