Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological site in Turkey of *vast* interest. The site dates to something like twelve *thousand* years ago, by far the earliest sign of monumental engineering. The culture that erected the stone structures there has been completely lost; it is effectively an alien world, dating from a time when humans ran into cave bears and mammoths and aurochs. It’s virtually like a window into the Hyborian Age.
It will be some decades before the site is fully excavated. But in the mean time, studies of the site – a hill – using ground penetrating radar have shown that the site covers a considerable area. Assuming the Islamic State, the Turkish Government, or some other group of whacked out nutjobs doesn’t trash the place, it should prove to be invaluable.
One interesting and useful website full of information on Göbekli Tepe is:
The Tepe Telegrams
News & Notes from the Göbekli Tepe Research Staff
It’s basically a blog with occasional updates. The most recent as of this writing covers the subsurface mapping efforts. A prior post covers the addition of the site to the UN’sWorld heritage List, which should provide aid in protecting and studying the site. This post illustrates some of the “masks” that have been uncovered, carved stone human faces. It’s clear that even then human artists were into abstract but identifiable depictions of the human face and form. Something a little odd about looking at someone’s idea of a face from 12,000 years ago.
The blog is, sadly, not devoid of the sort of social justice word salad we’ve come to expect these days, as exemplified here:
Engagement with non-Western thinkers and ethnographies reveals the conceptual potential of different modes of thought, metaphysics, and ways of being. Taking other systems of knowledge on equal intellectual terms is not only a matter of political exigency, but also constitutes a more holistic, reflexive, and critical archaeology. For instance, innumerable human groups around the globe describe realities wherein personhood and social relations are not exclusive to humans. Instead, animals, plants and material life can potentially act as subjects, with consciousness, agency and intentionality.
By liberating thought from Western metaphysical foundationalism, we become aware of the inadequacy of modern Western theories of matter to explain the prehistoric world fully. Paying attention to the phenomenal and ontological dimensions of the Göbekli architecture reveals limestone to be an agentive materiality from which powerful entities were released and brought into being through the practices of carving. It was likely that highly volatile gods, spirits and animals occupied the socio-cosmic universe of prehistoric south-east Anatolia. Through depicting these powerful or threatening agencies, people set up channels of engagement through which they could interact with dangerous entities on their own terms, affording participants a rare degree of controlled interaction in the existentially risky realm of the spirit world.
That said, the great majority of the blog is Damned Interesting.
