.Göbekli Tepe Open Book Project

2011-10-18T06:56:00.001-07:00

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the movie

2011-10-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

are needed to protect the site from external pressures. In 2011, in partnership with DAI, Global Heritage Fund (GHF) announced that it will support the first conservation program

2011-10-15T16:36:00.000-07:00

Gobekli Tepe: The world's oldest temple under conservation by the Global Heritage Fund


The site has been undergoing excavation since 1994, led by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI)’s Prof. Klaus Schmidt.

SANLIURFA, TURKEY.- Accidentally discovered by a shepherd 17 years ago, Göbekli Tepe is an 11,600-year-old temple site in southeastern Turkey that predates Stonehenge by roughly 6,000 years. Excavations that immediately followed have revealed monolithic T-shaped pillars erected by prehistoric people that, as far as we know, had not yet developed writing, metal tools or even pottery. The elaborately-carved stones, believed to be anthropomorphic symbols of human beings containing graphic details of animals, symbols and scenes, are systematically arranged in circles throughout the site, with a taller pair of pillars standing in the center of each circle. At least 20 pillars have been dug out, ranging from 3-6 meters in height and weighing between 6-10 tons each. The ability of this civilization to carry out such a complex project is itself a mystery, and while the evidence of a social hierarchy has not been proven, many archaeologists believe that the people who built Göbekli Tepe were the first advanced civilization on Earth. The site has been undergoing excavation since 1994, led by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI)’s Prof. Klaus Schmidt. As excavations progress and additional features become exposed, a shelter and conservation plan are needed to protect the site from external pressures. In 2011, in partnership with DAI, Global Heritage Fund (GHF) announced that it will support the first conservation program in Göbekli Tepe's history to ensure long-term protection and ongoing research of the world's oldest site of monumental architecture. In June 2011, Göbekli Tepe was featured in National Geographic in an article titled “The Birth of Religion.” The story discussed the significance of the massive pillars that are reshaping today’s ideas about the Neolithic Revolution and the dawn of civilization. Professor Schmidt believes that modern accepted theories about the Neolithic Revolution—that it was driven by the emergence of agriculture, with civilizations and religion following—can be proven wrong by findings at Göbekli Tepe, which point to the possibility that the ancient ceremonial site was built by existing settled communities and that civilization might actually be “a product of the human mind.”

Göbeklitepe more mystery

2011-10-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

Göbeklitepe more mystery

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Thursday, October 13, 2011

ŞANLIURFA - Anatolia News Agency

The latest excavation in Göbeklitepe in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa reveals that inhabitants 12,000 years ago also had a belief system and a certain culture. The remains show there is much more to be discovered from those ancient people, according to scholars.

Göbeklitepe site in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa includes important information on inhabitants from 12 millennia ago. The most important information that the team found was that the ancient people had a belief system. AA photo.

Recent excavations at the Göbeklitepe archaeological site have revealed that ancient people living there 12,000 years ago engaged in agriculture, processed leather, made sculptures and rock accessories and possessed a significant belief system.
The site in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa includes important information on the people 12 millennia ago, said Assistant Professor Cihat Kürkçüoğlu of the local Harran University.
Göbeklitepe includes many temples and archaeological works from the Neolithic era. Kürkçüoğlu evaluated the excavation, which is being carried out by Prof. Dr. Klaus Schmidt from the Berlin Germany Archaeology Institute.
The latest remains and excavations showed that those people had a culture and a belief system, said Kürkçüoğlu.
The excavation project has changed many perceptions about the site, he said, adding that ancient people processed wheat and knew about agriculture. “All this information came from the remains.”
The most important information that the team found was that the people had a belief system. “Those people made the first temple in the world and created the first monumental work of the world,” said Kürkçüoğlu.
Göbeklitepe society also had a concept of art, he said.
“Those people created beautiful artwork with stones,” he said, adding that there were serpent and bird figures in the rocks. “This is a very important milestone to learn that these people had an art and aesthetic knowledge.”
A leopard relief found on one of the rocks was a unique piece, according to Kürkçüoğlu. “This might be the oldest relief in the world,” he said, adding that the rock and the figures on it show that the Göbeklitepe people had artistic vision. “Those people are not hunters or nomads.”
Leather cultivation was an important activity among the people of Göbeklitepe because they knew how to cultivate leather, he added.
“The unearthed remains show a relief of fox leather on a man’s body,” said Kürkçüoğlu, adding that the cultivation of leather, engraving rocks, agriculture and architecture were very important developments for the archaeological world. “We believe that these discoveries will attract lots of people to Şanlıurfa.”
The monumental buildings of Göbeklitepe might be temples, according to Kürkçüoğlu. “However, we are not sure about this information,” he said

Gobekli Tepe indicate that people did indeed reside there.and thet have at all temples

2011-10-13T14:16:00.000-07:00

For one thing, Gobekli Tepe (the accepted story goes) was constructed by hunter-gatherers. When announced, this was major news. Ancient hunter-gatherers, who neither farmed nor lived in settled villages, had long been thought to be too simply organized to pull off anything on the scale of Gobekli Tepe.
For another thing, the site is billed by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt as the world's first temple. This provocative claim led to a National Geographic cover story last June. To pinpoint the dawn of religious ritual would, of course, be a fantastic accomplishment for anthropology.

Both of these major points are now contested by a Canadian anthropologist.

Writing in the October issue of the journal Current Anthropology, E.B. Banning suggests that the builders of Gobekli Tepe may have been settlers (not hunter-gatherers) at the site, living in spaces best understood as both sacred and domestic. In other words, there was no temple, but symbolic rituals of a sacred nature probably did take place within people's ordinary houses.

Banning charges that anthropologists too often make a cardinal error. They superimpose the modern Western concept of sacred versus profane (some buildings are reserved for religious activities and others for everyday living) incorrectly onto the Near Eastern past.

But let's start at the beginning. Why does Schmidt conclude that Gobekli Tepe was a temple? Excavating, Schmidt found no convincing signs of human occupation there: no ovens, fireplaces or other hints of residential dwellings. The huge T-shaped pillars seemed to him to represent stylized human shapes, and their carved images — scorpion-like animals, snakes and wild boar — he saw as religious totems. Again and again, the existing pillars had been buried and new ones constructed, as if to renew their power. For Schmidt, all this adds up to a temple.

By contrast, Banning finds it more likely that these ancient people made no sharp distinction been sacred and profane. Their cosmology, he writes, "infused everyday life — including its residential or domestic buildings, activities and spaces — with meaning and spirituality."

Among Banning's key points (winnowed from a long, dense paper) are these:

*Analogy from modern society tells us that house spaces do involve the sacred as well as the profane. (I note here that Banning apparently only approves of importing a modern comparison when it helps his case!) In West Africa, for instance, the Batammaliba people construct their houses in metaphorical keeping with their cosmology. The upper part is the sky, the terrace is the earth, and the lower rooms are the underworld.

*At other sites near Gobekli Tepe and built at around the same time, the dead were buried beneath the floors of houses, and skulls adorned the houses' interiors. In other words, sacred rituals and images infused the domestic areas.

* The buildings' size and style of construction (again taken within temporal context) in no way rule them out as houses. Further, portable mortars and stone bowls from Gobekli Tepe indicate that people did indeed reside there.

*Sickles, found on site, suggest that Gobekli Tepe people may well have been cultivating plants like emmer, einkorn and barley, even if they were not full-time farmers.

In sum, Banning thinks that Gobekli Tepe is a collection of houses where villagers carried out symbolic and sacred activities. There's no reason to invoke a specialized temple.

So what are we to think? I'm not yet ready to cast out the hunter-gatherers from the Gobekli Tepe scenario — no one knows for sure how these people made a living — but a fresh perspective on the use of ancient domestic space as also sacred space is welcome.

One conclusion holds firm. The Gobekli Tepe people carried out symbolic and sacred activities on a hilltop they adorned with massive architecture — 5,000 years before Stonehenge. Temple or no temple, that fact fascinates me still.

Barbara J. King is a biological anthropologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, the writer of non-fiction science books, most recently Being With Animals, a contributor to 13.7 and a Twitter addict.

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Is Gobekli the world's oldest temple, or Stone Age condo?

2011-10-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

Is Gobekli the world's oldest temple, or just a tricked-out Stone Age condo?

By Randy Boswell, Postmedia NewsOctober 10, 2011

Undated handout photo of a Wikipedia Commons closeup of one of the decorated pillars at Göbekli Tepe is southern Turkey.

Photograph by: Handout, Postmedia News

A Canadian scientist is shaking up the world of archeology after challenging high-profile claims - including June's cover story in the National Geographic - that an ancient site in Turkey is the world's oldest-known temple and represents "the birth of religion."

University of Toronto professor Ted Banning argues the sensational ruins just north of the Syrian border in southern Turkey may represent an elaborately decorated communal dwelling rather than a shrine to the gods.

Göbekli Tepe:not temples at all

2011-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Contact: Kevin Stacey
kstacey@press.uchicago.edu
401-284-3878
University of Chicago Press Journals

Archaeologist argues world's oldest temples were not temples at all

Ancient structures uncovered in Turkey and thought to be the world's oldest temples may not have been strictly religious buildings after all, according to an article in the October issue of Current Anthropology. Archaeologist Ted Banning of the University of Toronto argues that the buildings found at Göbekli Tepe may have been houses for people, not the gods.
The buildings at Göbekli, a hilltop just outside of the Turkish city of Urfa, were found in 1995 by Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute and colleagues from the Şanlıurfa Museum in Turkey. The oldest of the structures at the site are immense buildings with large stone pillars, many of which feature carvings of snakes, scorpions, foxes, and other animals.
The presence of art in the buildings, the substantial effort that must have been involved in making and erecting them, and a lack of evidence for any permanent settlement in the area, led Schmidt and others to conclude that Göbekli must have been a sacred place where pilgrims traveled to worship, much like the Greek ruins of Delphi or Olympia. If that interpretation is true it would make the buildings, which date back more than 10,000 years to the early Neolithic, the oldest temples ever found.
However, Banning offers an alternative interpretation that challenges some of Schmidt's claims.
He outlines growing archaeological evidence for daily activities at the site, such as flintknapping and food preparation. "The presence of this evidence suggests that the site was not, after all, devoid of residential occupation, but likely had quite a large population," Banning said.
Banning goes on to argue that the population may have been housed in the purported temples themselves. He disagrees with the idea that the presence of decorative pillars or massive construction efforts means the buildings could not have been residential space.
"The presupposition that 'art,' or even 'monumental' art, should be exclusively associated with specialized shrines or other non-domestic spaces also fails to withstand scrutiny," Banning writes. "There is abundant ethnographic evidence for considerable investment in the decoration of domestic structures and spaces, whether to commemorate the feats of ancestors, advertise a lineage's history or a chief's generosity; or record initiations and other house-based rituals."
Archaeological evidence for domestic art from the Neolithic period exists as well, Banning says, such as the wall paintings at Çatalhöyük, another archaeological site in Turkey.
Banning suggests that the purported temples may instead have been large communal houses, "similar in some ways to the large plank houses of the Northwest Coast of North America with their impressive house posts and totem poles."
"If so, they would likely have housed quite large households that might provide an extremely early example of what the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, called 'house societies,'" Banning said. "Such societies often use house structures for competitive display, locations for rituals, and explicit symbols of social units."
Banning hopes that more excavation at the site will ultimately shed more light on how these buildings were used. In the meantime, he hopes that researchers will not automatically assume that the presence of art or decoration in structures at Göbekli and elsewhere denotes an exclusively religious building.
"It is … likely that some of these buildings were the locus for a variety of rituals, probably including feasts, mortuary rites, magic, and initiations," he writes. "Yet there is generally no reason to presume a priori, even when these are as impressive as the buildings at Göbekli Tepe, that they were not also people's houses."

###

E. B. Banning, "So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East." Current Anthropology 52:5 (October 2011).
Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. The journal is published by The University of Chicago Press and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

2011-09-30T11:25:00.001-07:00

Our statement about this video: We cannot verify validity of its origins and the statement made in the video at this time. After some discussion we decided to post the video “Open Book policies” is just that. We have no other comments until we have time to investigate further…

thank you for you thoughts:pay homage to our heroes and to our gods

2011-09-27T10:48:00.000-07:00

The T-shaped pillars, or megaliths of Gobekli Tepe, Turkey, date back 12,000 years. They are around 2.7 metres tall and depict sophisticated images cut into stone of wild game: boars, lions, serpents and so on.

These standing stones, set out in circles, with floors of beaten limestone and remnant clay walls, (roofs once covered the pillars) represent the "oldest man-made place of worship ever found".

A place of worship – what does that term signify? Perhaps a place of commemoration and celebration. Ancestor worship, certainly.

We, as a reflective species, commemorate, and in doing so, preserve a record of achievement and triumph in those activities which define our culture. We pay homage to our heroes and to our gods – in so doing preserve memory of them in architecture and image, in song and dance.

2011-09-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

How art and farming was stared
by Gobekli Tepe

We can tell at 100% what the weather was like..

2011-09-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

Living in caves to get out of the cold is more than likely where mankind started down the road of masonry.

Core photo courtesy of Lonnie G. Thompson, The Ohio University

12,000 BP (before present) - Rapid Climate Change

Ice cores have revealed that global climate—long thought to change only very gradually—can shift with frightening speed, in some cases in a matter of years. As this graph shows, one such jump occurred about 12,000 years ago, as the last glacial period (the Pleistocene) was giving way to our current warm "interglacial" period (the Holocene). Suddenly, possibly in less than five years, average temperatures, which were slightly cooler than today's, plunged by about 27°F, returning the world to near-glacial conditions. (As the graph indicates, calcium levels tend to go up and snow accumulation down with temperature, which is estimated by comparing the ratio of oxygen isotopes in water—see "Temperature" in core at left.) The Younger Dryas, as this freak period is known, lasted about 1,300 years before it returned—just as abruptly—to the temperatures typical of the period immediately preceding it.
Data in graph taken from:
Alley, R.B., Meese, D., Shuman, C.A., Gow, A.J., Taylor, K., Ram, M., Waddington, E.D. and Mayewski, P.A., 1993, Abrupt increase in Greenland snow accumulation at the end of the Younger Dryas event, Nature 362, 527-529.

Grootes, P.M., Stuiver, M., White, J.W.C., Johnsen, S. and Jouzel, J., 1993, Comparison of oxygen isotope records from the GISP2 and GRIP Greenland ice cores, Nature 336, 552-554.

Mayewski, P.A., Meeker, L.D., Whitlow,S., Twickler, M.S., Morrison, M.C., Grootes, P.M., Bond, G.C., Alley, R.B., Meese, D.A., Gow, A.J., Taylor, K.C., Ram, M. and Wumkes, M., 1994, Changes in atmospheric circulation and ocean ice cover over the North Atlantic during the last 41,000 years, Science 263, 1747-1751.

Mayewski, P.A., Meeker, L.D., Twickler, M.S., Whitlow, S.I., Yang, Q. and Prentice, M., in press, 1997, Major Features and forcing of a high latitude Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation over the last 110,000 years, Journal of Geophysical Research.

What Came First - Temples or Tig?

Schmidt's argument is solipsistic, at best. You decide the oldest human structure that's ever been dug up is a temple, so

Concluding that civilization sprang from religion and not the other way around is both intellectually dubious and socially irresponsible.

therefore the purpose of the earliest man-made structure must be worship. What if the buildings at Göbekli Tepe are not temples?

Supposing we make the analogy that Mesolithic man was as a child. Certainly, he did not have the luxury of paying attention to much more than his most primal urges. Weather, sustenance, and predators took care of most of his brain-space, no matter how sophisticated his emotional and intellectual capacities were. In other words, he was like a child. What do most children do, once they're up and about and begin to have the freedom to bring their will to bear on theoutside world? Do they build Lego temples and solemnly gather together to pay homage to the great divine? They do not! They play with one another. They form essential human connections through apparently trivial interactions.

Göbekli Tepe Pictographs suggest a certain
sophistication, but not necessarily religious fervour. Image by Sean
Paul Kelley

In the case of the average 10th millenium BC bloke, those kinds of connections might well later save his life. Indeed, as humans, we're still hard-wired to seek out companionable agreement and respond to lack of social acceptance as a mortal threat, precisely because we haven't evolved very far from the men and women who needed every friend they could get when the woolly mammoth was upon them. Furthermore, anthropology tells us that humans like to compete in order to establish who carries the best genetic material in their eggs or sperm, and games therefore serve another function, which is to allow that ranking to occur. Göbekli Tepe looks to me just as much like an arena or entertainment space as it does a temple.
Concluding that civilization sprang from religion and not the other way around is both intellectually dubious and socially irresponsible. There are enough spurious facts out there for religious nutters to latch on to without Newsweek adding to the pile. The article reminds me of a review I once read by Rebecca West of a sociological book published in the 1950s that announced that adults were not especially emotionally attached to their children until the 19th century. As she wrily pointed out, if true, this must have caused much bewilderment among Shakespeare's contemporary audiences.
My suspicion is that, if the buildings at Göbekli Tepe are, indeed, temples - that is, buildings constructed purely for the purpose of ritualized acknowledgement of matters beyond the everyday - then it will turn out that the organized concentration of human habitation vastly predated them. Man, after all, invented God - not the other way around - and it seems highly unlikely that this was his first order of business.

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The First Post's report Q&A

2011-09-23T05:03:00.000-07:00

Gobekli Tepe: your questions answered

The First Post's report from an archaeological dig in Turkey has sparked interest worldwide. Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions

By Sean Thomas

LAST UPDATED 12:00 AM, OCTOBER 30, 2006

The archaeological team at Gobekli, working under Klaus Schmidt, has used radiocarbon analysis on the soils adhering to the stones. The analysis shows that the main stones at Gobekli Tepe were erected between 10,000 and 9,000 BC. The characteristics of flint arrowheads found here confirm these dates.

Q: How big is the site?
A: So far, 40-odd standing stones (two to four metres high) have been dug out. They are T-shaped and returning to Gobekli at specified times of the year.
Q: Why was the site buried in 8,000BC?
A: No one knows. But the way the dust is packed around the stones shows that Gobekli was entombed deliberately, and with some care.
pic

Q: How do they know it's a temple?
A: Evidence of any domestic use is entirely lacking. No remains of settled human habitation have been found nearby. But human skeletons have been found, in telling positions, which indicate that Gobekli was possibly a funerary complex, a shrine that celebrated the life and death of the hunters. It seems people brought the corpses of relatives here, and installed them in open niches by the stones. The many rock carvings on the stones also appear more ritualistic than domestic; likewise, the architectural arrangement of Gobekli prefigures much later Stone Age temples - like Avebury or Stonehenge.

Is it a reptile, wolf, cat, or some animal-spirit?

Q: How do they know the recently uncovered sculpture is a 'reptile'?

A: They don't know. Schmidt thinks it may be a reptile but isn't sure. Gobekli Tepe is so bizarre - and the newest finds so mysterious - no consensus has yet developed. Others believe the sculpture shows a wolf, a cat, or some other mammal. It possibly represents a kind of animal-spirit, watching over the dead.
Q: Is there really a link with the Garden of Eden?
A: The idea that the Eden story is a kind of allegorical folk memory - of the switch from hunter-gathering to farming - is not a new one: it's been canvassed by writer Hugh Brody, among others. What is new is the combination of data that links Genesis to this area of Turkey, and very early farming to this area: thus placing a 'metaphorical Eden' arguably in these environs. However, Klaus Schmidt emphasises that this is just a theory: "Gobekli Tepe is extraordinary enough, without speculation".
Q: How does the world of archaeology perceive Gobekli?
A: Academics agree on the site's revolutionary implications for our view of Stone Age civilisation and religion. No one knew Neolithic people were this artistic and leisured. Harald Hauptman at Heidelberg University believes the discoveries at Gobekli rank with the first uncovering of cave paintings in Lascaux, France in the 1940s. South African expert in palaeolithic art David Lewis Williams calls Gobekli Tepe "the most important archaeological dig anywhere in the world".

Sanliurfa

2011-09-20T13:47:00.001-07:00

Göbekli Tepe [Göbekli Höyük, Gobekli Tepe] Ancient Temple : The ...

www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=14968 - CachedSimilar

Jun 12, 2011 – Göbekli Tepe: [News and Comments:43] Ancient Temple in South Eastern Turkey, in Province of Sanliurfa on the Harran plain ... Only flint stone and bone tools have been found as ceramics hadn't been invented yet. .... it has many unique features that make it stand out among other sites in the region. ...

A lecture by Ted Bannings of the Anthropology Department, University of Toronto

2011-09-20T13:44:00.001-07:00

Events

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Monumental Debates: What are the “Temples” of Neolithic Göbekli Tepe

AIA Society Event: Toronto, ON
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - 5:00pm - 7:00pm
Location:
Bahen Centre, Room 1190, University of Toronto
40 St. George Street
Toronto, ON
Canada
A lecture by Ted Bannings of the Anthropology Department, University of Toronto.
Over the last 15 years, Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute and colleagues from the Şanlıurfa Museum in Turkey have been making remarkable finds at the site of Göbekli Tepe, a barren hilltop northeast of the city of Urfa. Schmidt has interpreted the buildings with enormous pillars, some engraved with pictures of animals, as the world’s first temples, some 11,000 years old, and has suggested that this large site was covered with such temples, rather than houses.
Ted Banning offers an alternative interpretation of this exciting site that challenges some of Schmidt’s claims about it. He presents the possibility that the large structures found in the earliest level at the site, rather than being temples, may be very large and impressive houses, similar, in some ways, to the large plank houses of the Northwest Coast of North America with their impressive house posts and totem poles. If so, they would likely have housed quite large households that might provide an extremely early example of what the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, called “house societies.” Such societies often use house structures for competitive display, locations for rituals, and explicit symbols of social units.
Admission to the lecture is free, non-AIA members are welcome. (A post-lecture reception for members-only will be held at the Archaeology Center at the University of Toronto, 19 Russell Street.)
Underground parking can be accessed from Huron Street.
Contact:
Meg Morden
memorden@gmail.com

2011-09-14T16:40:00.001-07:00

The Göbekli site is spread over an area of about 22 acres on a sort of plateau among the hills. There is a gently rounded mound, about 300 meters in diameter and 15 meters high, on the plateau. From the site there is an almost uninterrupted view of the horizon on all sides. To the north is the Taurus range, to the east the Karadağ. In the south, the Harran plain stretches away to Syria. To the west is a series of ridges over which the road from Orencik traverses, to reach the site.

excavations continue

2011-09-14T13:13:00.000-07:00

Archaeological excavations continue and the world's oldest temple in Göbeklitepe'de considered the center of the world's oldest city,''''The findings therefore considered to be in Sanliurfa, a few years ago,''Theme Park planned for the district Haleplibahçe Projesi''nin during the main excavation of the 5th and 6 believed to have been made centuries, the palace of the Roman administrator committed base of the Amazon warrior queen''found''mosaics.

It works on the archaeological excavations started in the field, the scientific advisory board of works created during the transfer to another location on concern it will break,''Theme Park Project ' 'were made in the amendment.

for a while and then decided to make the field''in the works and the Mosaic Museum, Archaeology Museum-ArcheoPark Project'', Labour and SocialSecurityAccelerated by the instructions of the Minister Faruk Çelik.

In this context, 61 thousand square meters, a huge area of architectural and engineering projects to be prepared for the project, SanliurfaCultureand Natural Heritage Protection was adopted by the Council

2011-09-14T07:13:00.001-07:00

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2011-09-11T17:26:00.001-07:00

2011-09-11T16:20:00.001-07:00

This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."

2011-09-11T10:48:00.001-07:00

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'Gobekli Tepe is not the Garden of Eden

2011-09-11T10:44:00.000-07:00

<excerpt>

Back then, on the day I arrived at the dig, the archaeologists were unearthing mind-blowing artworks. As these sculptures were revealed, I realised that I was among the first people to see them since the end of the Ice Age.

And that's when a tantalising possibility arose glasses of black tea, served in tents right next to the megaliths, Klaus Schmidt told me . Over that, as he put it: 'Gobekli Tepe is not the Garden of Eden: it is a temple in Eden.'

To understand how a respected academic like Schmidt can make such a dizzying claim, you need to know that many scholars view the Eden story as folk-memory, or allegory.

The reason Gobekli Tepe is having such an impact on our present state of understanding

2011-09-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

2

kplhardison

Teacher
Editor Emeritus, Debater, Expert, Educator, Scribe

The reason Gobekli Tepe is having such an impact on our present state of understanding earliest civilization is that, for one thing, it is so much older than anything previously know. For another thing, it places worship and purposeful intention that much earlier while shedding light upon historical cognitive function since symbolism is a fixture of the T-shaped pillars.

Posted by kplhardison on August 9, 2011.

Ancient alien theory grew out of the centuries-old idea that life exists on other planets, and that humans and extraterrestrials have crossed paths before. The theme of human-alien interaction was thrust into the spotlight in the 1960s, driven by a wave of UFO sightings and popular films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. The space program played no small part in this as well: If mankind could travel to other planets, why couldn’t extraterrestrials visit Earth?

In 1968, the Swiss author Erich von Däniken published Chariots of the Gods?, which became an immediate bestseller. In it, he put forth his hypothesis that, thousands of years ago, space travelers from other planets visited Earth, where they taught humans about technology and influenced ancient religions. He is regarded by many as the father of ancient alien theory, also known as the ancient astronaut theory.

Most ancient alien theorists, including von Däniken, point to two types of evidence to support their ideas. The first is ancient religious texts in which humans witness and interact with gods or other heavenly beings who descend from the sky—sometimes in vehicles resembling spaceships—and possess spectacular powers. The second is physical specimens such as artwork depicting alien-like figures and ancient architectural marvels like Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt.

If aliens visited Earth in the past, could they make an appearance in the future? For ancient alien theorists, the answer is a resounding yes. They believe that, by sharing their views with the world, they can help prepare future generations for the inevitable encounter that awaits them.

the find of a life time

2011-09-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

Professor Schmidt "only roughly five percent of the site being excavated thus far"

2011-09-11T10:03:00.000-07:00

Just the tip of the icebergProfessor Schmidt compares the scale of work remaining to be done at Göbekli Tepe to other important archaeological sites such as Troy or Pergamon, where excavation work started over 100 years ago. “It’s hard to give a detailed schedule on how long further excavation will take,” he points out and notes,”There’s work for more than one generation of archaeologists at the place, without question.”
Since work began at the site no signs of residences or fortifications have been found. Göbekli Tepe is now known for the stone columns, each weighing tons, which were bound into a circle by segments of wall that enclosed them on the interior and the exterior. In the center, there was a single pair of pillars which have large-scale reliefs of wild beasts, such as lions and bulls, wild boars, foxes and snakes. On the upper levels at Göbekli Tepe there are smaller versions of these as well as others that are quadrilateral.
“Göbekli Tepe is approximately 300 meters wide and 15 meters high,” he explains, with only roughly five percent of the site being excavated thus far

2011-09-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

.Göbekli Tepe Open Book Project

the movie

are needed to protect the site from external pressures. In 2011, in partnership with DAI, Global Heritage Fund (GHF) announced that it will support the first conservation program

Göbeklitepe more mystery

Göbeklitepe more mystery

Gobekli Tepe indicate that people did indeed reside there.and thet have at all temples

Is Gobekli the world's oldest temple, or Stone Age condo?

Is Gobekli the world's oldest temple, or just a tricked-out Stone Age condo?

Undated handout photo of a Wikipedia Commons closeup of one of the decorated pillars at Göbekli Tepe is southern Turkey.

Photograph by: Handout, Postmedia News

Göbekli Tepe:not temples at all

Archaeologist argues world's oldest temples were not temples at all

thank you for you thoughts:pay homage to our heroes and to our gods

We can tell at 100% what the weather was like..

What Came First - Temples or Tig?

The First Post's report Q&A

Gobekli Tepe: your questions answered

The First Post's report from an archaeological dig in Turkey has sparked interest worldwide. Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions

Sanliurfa

Göbekli Tepe [Göbekli Höyük, Gobekli Tepe] Ancient Temple : The ...

A lecture by Ted Bannings of the Anthropology Department, University of Toronto

excavations continue

'Gobekli Tepe is not the Garden of Eden

The reason Gobekli Tepe is having such an impact on our present state of understanding

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the find of a life time

.Göbekli Tepe update

Professor Schmidt "only roughly five percent of the site being excavated thus far"