By “what pertains to human beings by nature,” I mean what is essential and universal for human beings, at least since the Axial Age beginning circa 800 b.c. and probably since the Neolithic era beginning circa 9500 b.c. I make claims about anthropological universals, which should apply to human beings in all other cultures, not just Christendom or the West.

This simply won’t do.

Let’s start with the fact that if we are searching for human “nature,” we can’t start at the end. This is what Smith does when he concatenates history and begins his story with the Axial Age or perhaps even the Neolithic transition. For anthropologists, the Axial Age is like yesterday and the Neolithic the day before.

Fully modern humans had been roaming the earth for several tens of thousands of years before some settled into the domestic and religious routines of Neolithic or agricultural life. If we are seeking human “nature,” doesn’t it make sense to look for it among those people? Don’t they have “natural” history? Doesn’t that history tell us something fundamental about what humans are (or can alternatively be) absent the powerful social patterning of modern societies?

It’s not surprising that Smith would start his search for anthropological “universals” and human “nature” with the Axial Age. The very (contested) notion of “essences” derives from the Axial strand that began with Plato and culminated in Christianity. There is an apt genealogical basis for Nietzsche’s comment that Christianity is “Platonism for the people.”

There were of course other Axial strands and places in the world where Axial movements had little or no impact. In those places, usually out of the main commercial way and relatively untouched by post-Neolithic modernity, life carried on in ways that resembled the deep past which Smith has chosen to ignore. In these places too we might find something important about the possibilities and idiosyncracies of human “nature.”

With such an inauspicious beginning to his essay, it’s not surprising to find that Smith’s conception of human “nature” is parochial. His view of human “essence” is not a timeless universal but is a situated and timely view from somewhere. That somewhere happens to be Notre Dame, a place where the concerns and prejudices of the post-Enlightenment Christian West are often projected onto the world and others as “universal human nature.” These concerns and prejudices are neither universal nor natural.

While I can agree with Smith that humans naturally generate supernatural ideas, this default is due to ordinary operations of the brain-mind. Humans aren’t, as Smith claims, naturally religious because we need to make truth claims, problem solve, create meaning, or act morally. These needs, which Smith calls strong tendencies, are precisely those which arose after (and in conjunction with) the Neolithic. They are not, therefore, universal in either time or space.

If you are quixotically seeking “anthropological universals,” the first place to look is in the deep or prehistoric past. The next would be in those societies that were relatively untouched by Neolithic modernity and Axial movements. Had Smith done this, he would have found that his supposed universals aren’t universal.

Smith’s error here is a common one which I recently wrote about while gently criticizing Czech moral economist Thomas Sedlacek’s argument that humans are naturally greedy. This is an historically challenged fallacy of the post hoc ergo propter hoc variety:

If we are talking about the human condition since the advent of agriculture, Sedlacek’s story has a great deal of validity. Sedlacek errs, however, in asserting that greed — always wanting more — is an “innate natural phenomenon” that marks the “beginning of our history.” This is a common error whether we are talking about economic history or religious history.

It arises from the illusion that everything essentially began with the Neolithic transition and “civilization.” As this myth goes, there was no history or society for the people who hunted and gathered for tens of thousands of years before settlements and cities. But these people, and some of their descendants who continued foraging until recently, had history. This history suggests that greed — always wanting more — is not an “innate natural phenomenon.”

While there are pan-human tendencies based in common neurobiology, classifying these as “natural” or “universal” or “essential” is an enterprise fraught with agendas and difficulties.

These answers aren’t surprising given our embeddedness in a culture whose dominant form of religion claims that life and death acquire meaning only within its milieu. Aside from the obvious objection that religion can intensify the fear of death for those who worry about hell and predestination, there is another: religions focused on meaning in life and purpose in death (i.e., some kind of afterlife) are relative newcomers to the supernatural world. They are post-Neolithic.

The domestication of plants and animals had profound consequences which can be summed with a series: sedentism, surplus, specialization, stratification, slavery, and sickness. Life in agricultural societies is fundamentally different from life in foraging societies. It is only in the former that people spend inordinate amounts of time wondering about the meaning or purpose of life and death. The previously summed series can have this existential effect.

None of this is to say that foraging or nomadic lifeways don’t present their own sets of challenges, because they do. These concerns, however, typically aren’t existential. Life among kin, however harsh, doesn’t present as absurd, dislocated, or senseless. There is a reason why hunter-gatherer ethnohistories don’t record people contemplating or despairing over “the meaning of it all.” This reason has nothing to do with intellectual abilities or the progress of thought. It has everything to do with the lifeways and conditions which spawn these kinds of questions.

Having said all this, there is little doubt that such questions arose after agriculture and became acute with industrialization. For many, such as Leo Tolstoy, even the consolations of religion were not enough to quell the twin fears of meaning and mortality. In this riveting piece on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Jordan Smith discusses Tolstoy’s novella and its influence:

The story’s literary merits were never in doubt, but its status as thanatology took some time to develop. It failed to register with European and American psychologists for most of the 20^th century, probably because Freud’s brand of psychoanalysis emphasized dreams, sex and childhood, relegating death largely to the background.

But in 1973, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death. In it, Becker argued that the fear of death “haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Man’s subconscious fear of death and desire to transcend its inevitability leads him to create or achieve something “heroic”, so that the immortality of that creation or act might redeem the mortality of its maker. Fear of death is universal, and denial of it is equally cross-cultural.

Tolstoy’s story also imprinted on Irvin Yalom, the Stanford psychiatrist whose therapy seeks to ameliorate isolation and meaninglessness:

Yalom relies on The Death of Ivan Ilych in two important books. In Existential Psychotherapy (1980), Yalom writes, “No one has ever described the deep irrational belief in our own specialness more powerfully or poignantly than Tolstoy . . . through the lips of Ivan Ilych.” According to Yalom, humans develop a false sense of specialness as a defense against the certainty of death. “[D]eep, deep down, each of us believes, as does Ivan Ilych, that the rule of mortality applies to others but certainly not to ourselves.”

Nearly thirty years later, Yalom again turned to Tolstoy and Becker in Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008). There he argues that death anxiety is lessened by the sense that one has lived a full, meaningful life. Ilych “is dying so badly because he has lived so badly,” he writes (emphasis in original).

It would be churlish to argue that existential angst isn’t real or that death isn’t cause for doubt. Since the Neolithic, religions (especially the Axial movements) have been grappling with meaning and mortality. This doesn’t mean, however, that humans have always been haunted by these questions or that religions originated to address them.

Post Postscript

In this piece on death and fear, Stephen Cave states: “This struggle to project ourselves into an unending future is the foundation of human achievement: the wellspring of religion, the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts. That religions are very much a product of our yearning for immortality is perhaps obvious.” Taking this as a universal and ahistorical given, Cave then discusses how Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam deal with death.

This illustrates my historical point perfectly well. These Axial traditions are, in their own ways, much concerned with death and continuing life or immortality. It would be a mistake, however, to infer that these relatively modern religions speak to the evolution of supernatural beliefs or that these faiths somehow account for the origins of supernaturalism. They don’t.

The death terror and death responses are unique to certain kinds of societies and religions which grow out of these are not human universals. These religions grew from societies in which death was occurring in frequencies and ways never before seen in human history. It makes sense that they would respond to these vastly increased scales of death.

While I greatly admire Pagels’ work and understand this was a lecture setting, this answer won’t do. The emotional explanation for religion has been around for a long time and was most famously stated by Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion (1927).

Freud explains religion as wish fulfillment, with emotional fear playing the major role. Humans faced with an inexplicable and cruel world create coping mechanism gods: “The gods retain the threefold task: they must exorcize the terrors of nature, they must reconcile men to the cruelty of Fate, particularly as it is shown in death, and they must compensate them for the sufferings and privations which a civilized life in common has imposed on them.”

This is a good explanation as far as it goes but the problem is that it doesn’t go very far. Many things contribute to religiosity, with emotions being only one of several contributing factors. There undoubtedly is a cognitive component to religiosity. Human brains have evolved in such a way that we naturally generate supernatural concepts.

At some time in human history, perhaps 60,000 years ago, minds became fully modern or capable of thinking as we think. Once this occurred, it would not have taken long for people to begin constructing stories about supernatural perceptions. Over tens of thousands of years these stories would have become increasingly elaborate. All modern religions are related, in deep time and through conceptual descent, to these early forms of religion or shamanisms.

Two more recent transformations altered the basic ancestral patterns of supernaturalism. The first was Neolithization or the domestication of plants-animals. When people settle down and begin producing food, shamanisms give way to the earliest organized religions. The second was the transformation wrought on these religions by Axial movements or the Axial Age. Today’s “world religions” all have Axial roots.

The entire history of religions, therefore, has a cognitive component and a cultural component. They work together and it is hard to say one is more important than the other. They are equally essential to explain the persistence of religion.

All cognitive and cultural activities have an emotional aspect to them. In this sense, one can say that emotions play a major role in religiosity even if this role is not (as Pagels suggests) mono-causal.

This is of course simply an abbreviated sketch of religious history. The emotional aspect of this history is treated with considerable sophistication by Robert Fuller in Spirituality in the Flesh: Bodily Sources of Religious Experience (Oxford 2008). Fuller situates these emotions within an evolutionary framework and shows how everything works together to produce what he calls “spirituality.”

Even if you don’t agree with Fuller, his body or emotion based approach to these issues deserves serious consideration and makes considerable sense.

• It was built by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary or village agriculturalists.
• It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
• The massive stone pillars or megaliths were “temples” or “shrines.”
• Göbekli was not a residential site and the structures were not occupied.

From these conclusions flow the claim that a new kind of symbolism led to the domestication of plant and animals. According to the excavator Klaus Schmidt, hunter-gatherers living in the region developed a new religion 11,000 years ago which resulted in the Neolithic Revolution, and this radically new way of life spread from Göbekli to the rest of the world. No explanation has been offered for what might have (divinely) sparked this “new religion” that is responsible for modern civilization.

These are extraordinary claims that require extraordinary evidence. In the previous posts in this series, we have examined some of the evidence and over the past week I have read most of the Göbekli papers. The evidence does not, at this time, support these claims.

Let’s start with what the evidence does show, keeping in mind the all-important point that perhaps 5% of the total site (and none of the surrounds) have been excavated:

• The people who built and used Göbekli were hunting and gathering.
• The structures and symbols at Göbekli had ritual significance.
• The T-shaped pillars are the oldest known megaliths.
• People were preparing and eating plants-animals while at Göbekli.
• People were making tools at Göbekli.

Göbekli is undoubtedly impressive and important. It was built and used during a momentous transition in human history: from food gathering to food production. This transition or “Neolithicization” was not a single event that occurred in one place and one time. It was sporadic and uneven, taking several hundreds or even thousands of years. It occurred fitfully at different times and in different places. Göbekli was not the sole source of this transition and is not the seat of the Neolithic Revolution.

It obviously required substantial resources to build Göbekli, so how was it done? If the builders were in fact hunter-gatherers without incipient agriculture or animal husbandry, one possible answer comes from Klaus Schmidt. The picture he paints of Göbekli 11,000 years ago is of a veritable paradise or “hunter’s dream.” If the area surrounding Göbekli was as rich and full of year-round resources as he suggests, the people there would not have been ordinary hunter-gatherers.

When hunter-gatherers are fortunate enough to find themselves in resource rich areas, they tend to settle and their societies become bigger and more complex. The paradigmatic example comes from the American Northwest Coast, where natives settled on stretches of river that provided abundant and reliable salmon. They built impressive structures and developed a rich symbolism; their rituals were elaborate.

Where resources are concentrated and dense, populations grow and people have time to do things other than gather and hunt. Perhaps Göbekli was such a place.

It seems more likely however that the people at Göbekli were hunting and gathering in a resource rich area, in addition to being in a region where the process of Neolithicization was well underway. We are fortunate to have excellent descriptions of this process, which began in the Levant, in the October 2011 pre-print issue of Current Anthropology (Banning’s Göbekli article is in the already printed October issue).

In “Becoming Farmers: The Inside Story” and “Neolithization Processes in the Levant: The Outer Envelope” (open access), Anna Belfer-Cohen and Nigel Goring-Morris survey the many developments in the region which culminated in the domestication of plants and animals. The authors provide the larger historical context into which Göbekli fits and effectively demystify Göbekli in the process.

This brings us back to Banning and the questions he raises in “So Fair a House.” Banning was not the first archaeologist to suggest that Schmidt’s interpretations and claims were questionable but he was the first to write a substantive article about them. Banning is not alone in thinking that Göbekli may be a Neolithic village and not a hunter-gatherer cult center.

It is premature to decide these issues one way or another. Too little of the site and surrounding area has been excavated. Those monumental portions that have been excavated have yielded suggestive evidence. More (and finer-grained) excavation, without preconceived ideas about what is being excavated, needs to occur. Specific hypotheses need to be formulated and tested. Until these things happen, Göbekli should be bracketed with a series of question marks.

Whatever questions remain, there is no question that Klaus Schmidt deserves enormous credit and thanks. His keen eye resulted in the discovery of Göbekli, and his hard work has yielded up an historical treasure. He understands that this treasure will keep giving for decades to come and is not to be ripped out of the ground in a frenzy, monetary and political pressures notwithstanding. He is by all accounts the most gracious of hosts who shares his time and finds freely.

Göbekli is and will remain one of the world’s premier archaeological sites no matter what it actually is or represents.

References:

Goring-Morris, A., & Belfer-Cohen, A. (2011). Neolithization Processes in the Levant Current Anthropology, 52 (S4) DOI: 10.1086/658860

Belfer-Cohen, A., & Goring-Morris, A. (2011). Becoming Farmers: Current Anthropology, 52 (S4) DOI: 10.1086/658861

E.B. Banning suggests something along these lines in “So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East” (Current Anthropology 2011). Banning exhaustively reviews the Göbekli evidence and challenges the prevailing interpretation of the site. This is precisely what was needed and it shows archaeology working as a science.

In his very first site report from 1998, Schmidt had already concluded that Göbekli was a ritual center and claimed the “archaeological evidence is overwhelming, as the function of two partially excavated pillar buildings irrefutably prove.” As Banning’s article shows, the evidence is not overwhelming and the claims that have been made about Göbekli are refutable.

After surveying the evidence and various claims made by Schmidt, Banning offers an alternative view. It is a view informed by lessons learned from history and theory. The history comes from another famous Neolithic site, Çatalhöyük, which was first excavated in the 1960s by James Mellart. Mellart interpreted richly decorated structures as ritual “shrines” and claimed they were not residential. It was later found that the so-called “shrines” were in fact houses.

The theory comes from the ethnographically informed realization that binaries such as sacred/profane and secular/religious are post-Enlightenment Western constructs rather than human universals. By extension and association, this means that the ritual/domestic binary is either suspect or provincial. None of these binaries can be projected uncritically back in time and mapped onto 11,000 year old ruins. Historically situated and modern conceptions are not reliable guides to ancient cosmologies. And given what we know about most non-Western cosmologies, it seems unlikely that the Göbekli world was constructed or perceived through these binaries.

It is more likely that the sacred/profane existed on a continuum and were conjoined, as were ritual and domestic activities. With these things in mind, Banning observes: “The point is not that specialized shrines are incompatible with domestic ritual but that evidence for ritual or conspicuous symbolism does not automatically imply specialized temples.”

These salutary reminders out of the way, Banning turns to the nub of the Göbekli issue: “The question is whether the evidence justifies the site’s interpretation, as its excavator argues, as a hunter-gatherer cult center with no domestic occupation at all.” To answer it, Banning examines several aspects of the site: (a) the famous T-shaped pillars which Schmidt asserts were free-standing, open-air monoliths (similar to those at Stonehenge), (b) the supposed lack of evidence for household or domestic activities, (c) the alleged lack of access to water and (d) the ostensible absence of domesticated plants-animals.

For each, Banning points to contradictory evidence and suggests looking for additional corroborating or refuting evidence. In some cases this involves nothing more than looking at the existing evidence differently, more closely, or without preconceptions. In all cases, Banning finds the evidence or lack thereof equivocal.

If the Göbekli structures were in fact unroofed, it surely follows they were not houses. Beginning with a structural examination of the pillars, Banning suggests they are placed and buttressed in a manner that would have supported overhead wooden beams, which in turn would have been thatched. There are several hints (ranging from grooves and notches to wood) that this may in fact have been the case, and Banning has sketched one possible layout:

Göbekli’s T-shaped pillars are arranged in the round and may seem completely unique (which they are in terms of size alone), yet it turns out that similar pillars and arrangements are found at other Neolithic sites in the area, and in several cases these structures are residential.

Aside from the structures themselves, the most remarkable feature of Göbekli is that it was discovered virtually intact. Fortuitously for archaeologists, Göbekli’s users (whether occupants or visitors) periodically filled earlier and older structures with surrounding debris and built on top of them. After its final use, the site was again filled. This explains why the site went unrecognized for so long; it looked like just another hill.

Banning is particularly interested in the huge amounts of fill material that were used and which he suspects was created on site as a result of occupation:

Notably, the site’s deep deposits also exhibit high densities of lithics—including a variety of points, scrapers, burins, and sickle blades—as well as evidence for “all stages of production.” One might expect to find stone tools related to the quarrying and manufacture of limestone monoliths and debris from the tools’ manufacture, but those in the fills, at least, are not noticeably different from what one might expect to find in a domestic deposit.

There is also abundant animal bone while dark earth found in the soil horizons may be anthropogenic, probably associated with the high density of bone fragments and other organic materials. Plant remains are not well preserved in these deposits but include a broad suite of edible wild seeds and the charcoal of trees such as ash, almond, poplar, and Brant’s oak that could have furnished both fuel and roof timbers.

In addition, Banning identifies possible hearths or hearth rings and mortars that would have been used to process grain. Some of these are bedrock mortars, which I happened to notice — near what appears to be a large cistern — in privately taken pictures of the site. The cistern is interesting because it speaks to the issue of water: Schmidt asserts that Göbekli had no easy or reliable access to this essential resource.

It would be unwise to assume that the lack of water at the site today is indicative of the situation 11,000 years ago:

[D]uring Göbekli Tepe’s occupation around 8000 cal BC, during the early Boreal period, the climate was considerably more humid than the current 450 mm of mean annual precipitation would suggest, and the water table was likely rather higher, potentially with springs closer to the site that no longer exist. Deforestation and modern irrigation projects have also had serious impacts on local water tables and streamflow, making the present distribution of water a poor indicator of Neolithic water sources.

Indeed, the many different kinds of (moisture-loving) plant remains found at the site suggest that water fell or flowed in amounts sufficient to nourish them.

In Schmidt’s estimation, these plant remains are — like the abundant animal remains — significant because they do not show signs of domestication. Aside from the difficulties of identifying domestication on the basis of morphology (with domesticated seeds being larger and domesticated animals smaller), Göbekli is a transitional Neolithic site. Hunting and gathering did not simply stop when people began planting seeds and controlling animals or domesticating them.

During this transitional period, plants and animals on the way to domestication may not look like their wild counterparts or may be “tweeners.” Of course some of these plants and animals were never domesticated; their presence is best explained by a mixed economy: there was some hunting and gathering of non-domesticates while at the same time others were being selected for domestication.

Where does this leave us? Banning has an idea and states it forcefully, though not in precisely this order:

While there is no doubt that Göbekli Tepe is an important site and that aspects of its structures were symbolically loaded, the claim that the site had no residential occupation is simply not credible.

Most likely, either the famous “temples” are actually houses or houses lie elsewhere on the site and are simply not represented or not yet identified in the excavated sample.

In short, there is no strong reason to assume that the people who used the buildings at Göbekli Tepe, in any stratum, were not Neolithic villagers.

Ignoring even the possibility that some of the claimed shrines and temples at Neolithic sites may have been houses or other types of buildings, however, could distort our interpretations not only of Neolithic religion but of nonreligious aspects of the communities that inhabited or used those sites.

So fair a holy house indeed. In the next and final post in the Göbekli series, we will synthesize the materials from the previous ones and take stock of the whole.

Reference:

Banning, E.B. (2011). So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Current Anthropology, 52 (5), 619-660 : 10.1086/661207

The first report — “Beyond Daily Bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic Ritual” — appeared in 1998. After noting that his views are preliminary, Schmidt contrasts Göbekli with similar sites whose location can be explained because they have water access, agricultural land, and hunting grounds. Göbekli seemingly lacked these things, a fact which makes its location puzzling. For Schmidt, this suggests Göbekli was sited for “non-profane” or sacred reasons.

Here Schmidt deploys Emile Durkheim’s problematic sacred-profane dichotomy that is closely related to (and probably derives from) the Enlightenment construct of secular-religious. A corollary of this dichotomy is a distinction between ritual and non-ritual activities, which Schmidt applies to Göbekli:

[R]itual activity, aside from burials, is not normally an archaeologically predictable phenomenon, and evidence for such special events is certainly rare in the earlier prehistoric archaeological record. Göbekli Tepe, on the other hand, apparently was a special location devoted to very important specific rituals, at least for a certain time. The archaeological evidence is overwhelming, as the function of two partially excavated pillar buildings irrefutably prove.

After only a few years of excavation, Schmidt was clearly impressed by the size and scale of the megalithics and their seemingly anomalous placement on the landscape. Already, Schmidt had concluded that Göbekli was a ritual or religious site and the evidence was not only “overwhelming” but also “irrefutable.” With perhaps 1-2% of the total site having been excavated at that time (based on estimates that 5% has been excavated through 2011), these are interesting assertions.

In 2001, Schmidt published “Göbekli Tepe: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations.” In this report Schmidt affirms and extends his previous conclusions:

The function of these buildings can only be characterized as associated with ritual purposes, and no serious claim for domestic use is tenable. It is clear that Gobekli Tepe was not an early Neolithic settlement with some ritual buildings, but that the whole site served a mainly ritual function. It was a mountain sanctuary.

Whatever Göbekli represents, it is even more astonishing given Schmidt’s assertion — based on the ostensible fact that only “wild” or non-domesticated plant remains and animal bones had been found — that it was constructed by hunter-gatherers who must have periodically come together for ritual reasons. Schmidt then suggests that ritual or religion spurred the domestication of plant-animals and caused the Neolithic Revolution:

Cauvin’s connection between the profane and the sacred, is a perfect guide to understand the change of the hunter-gatherer societies to the Neolithic way of life, not only through economic or ecological reasons, but by the impact of a transcendental sphere….Gordon Childe’s Neolithic Revolution is getting a new facet, the religious one.

Here Schmidt references French archaeologist Jacques Cauvin, who controversially argues in The Birth of the Gods and Origins of Agriculture (2000) that hunter-gatherers developed more complex religious ideas before they domesticated plants-animals, and that the Neolithic Revolution was the result rather than a cause. Schmidt obviously agrees and interprets Göbekli as proof.

In “Göbekli Tepe — The Stone Age Sanctuaries” (2010), Schmidt details recent finds and interprets them in light of his earlier conclusions:

Göbekli Tepe was not used for habitation; it consists of several sanctuaries in the form of round megalithic enclosures. [N]o residential buildings have been discovered. However, at least two phases of monumental religious architecture have been uncovered.

[T]here is no question that the site of Göbekli Tepe was not a mundane settlement of the period, but a site belonging to the religious sphere, a sacred area, since the excavation has revealed no residential buildings. Göbekli Tepe seems to have been a regional centre where communities met to engage in complex rites.

So the general function of the enclosures remains mysterious; but it is clear that the pillar statues in the centre of these enclosures represented very powerful beings. If gods existed in the minds of Early Neolithic people, there is an overwhelming probability that the T-shape is the first know monumental depiction of gods.

Schmidt then asserts that a religious revolution caused the Neolithic Revolution:

There are no domesticated animals or plants. The enclosures date to the period of transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer societies during the 10th and 9th millennia in the Near East. The evolution of modern humanity involved a fundamental change from small-scale, mobile hunter-gatherer bands to large, permanently co-resident communities.

Jacques Cauvin’s suggestions were correct: the factor that allowed the formation of large, permanent communities was the facility to use symbolic culture, a kind of pre-literate capacity for producing and ‘reading’ symbolic material culture, that enabled communities to formulate their shared identities, and their cosmos.

Although Schmidt offers several possibilities for interpreting Göbekli’s rich symbolism, he does not explain (in either this article or others) what might have caused this religious revolution. If radically different ideas led the way to domestication and “civilization,” how do we account for the development of these ideas?

This seminal question aside, there are others. In the next post we will look at E.B. Banning’s recent article in Current Anthropology which challenges Schmidt’s interpretation of Göbekli.

References:

Schmidt, Klaus (1998). Beyond Daily Bread: Evidence of Early Neolithic Rituals from Gobekli Tepe Neo-Lithics, 2, 1-5

Schmidt, Klaus (2001). Gobekli Tepe, Southeastern Turkey: A Preliminary Report on the 1995-1999 Excavations Paleorient, 26 (1), 45-54

Schmidt, Klaus (2010). Göbekli Tepe – The Stone Age Sanctuaries: New Results of Ongoing Excavations with a Special Focus on Sculptures and High Reliefs Documenta Praehistorica, XXXVII, 239-256

I wouldn’t normally look to popular press coverage to determine what an archaeologist is thinking or saying, but in this case it seems warranted, primarily because Schmidt has been interviewed for many of the articles and makes similar claims in his professional publications (which will be the subject of the next post). So let’s look at some of this coverage, which has garnered worldwide attention.

The most recent is National Geographic’s “The Birth of Religion” (June 2011) which comes with this byline: “We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.” Discussing the people who built and used the site, Schmidt stated:

These people were foragers, people who gathered plants and hunted wild animals. Our picture of foragers was always just small, mobile groups, a few dozen people. They cannot make big permanent structures, we thought, because they must move around to follow the resources. They can’t maintain a separate class of priests and craft workers, because they can’t carry around all the extra supplies to feed them. Then here is Göbekli Tepe, and they obviously did that.

The author then contextualizes Schmidt’s claims:

Anthropologists have assumed that organized religion began as a way of salving the tensions that inevitably arose when hunter-gatherers settled down, became farmers, and developed large societies….Göbekli Tepe, to Schmidt’s way of thinking, suggests a reversal of that scenario: The construction of a massive temple by a group of foragers is evidence that organized religion could have come before the rise of agriculture and other aspects of civilization.

In 2008, the Smithsonian covered Göbekli in “The World’s First Temple?” Interviewed for the piece, Schmidt asserts that Göbekli is “the first human-built holy place” and humanity’s first “cathedral on a hill.” When it was constructed and in use, Göbekli was like “paradise” and much different from what it is today (after 10,000 years of settlement and farming):

Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn…“From here the dead are looking out at the ideal view. They’re looking out over a hunter’s dream.”

Visions like these were the apparent impetus for Spiegel’s cover story suggesting that Göbekli may have been the mythical “Garden of Eden.” Perhaps most surprising were Ian Hodder’s comments on Göbekli’s significance: “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later. You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.” Hodder is the Stanford based archaeologist who is excavating Çatalhöyük, another famously important Neolithic site in Turkey.

Also in 2008, Science covered Göbekli in “Seeking The Roots of Ritual.” This article best sums up the claims being made by Schmidt:

Schmidt insists this was no settlement. He’s convinced that the circles were designed to be open to the sky, like Stonehenge. Telltale signs of settlement—such as hearths, trash pits, and small fertility figurines—are conspicuously absent. And the hilltop is a long hike from any water sources.

“We know what settlements from these times look like,” Schmidt says. “This isn’t one of them.” Instead, Schmidt argues that hunter-gatherers from across the region gathered here periodically, pooled their resources temporarily to build the monuments for some ritual purpose, and then left.

Schmidt argues that the site’s antiquity and the lack of domesticated animal and plant remains is strong circumstantial evidence that symbolism and religion led to agriculture and domestication, not the other way around.

“Developing from hunter-gatherers to farmers happened here and spread south,” Schmidt says. “Not just architecture and monumental architecture, but turning wild animals into domestic livestock happened here. This is the starting point for a whole front of innovation.”

Ian Hodder appears to agree and comments that elaborated symbols and ideas came first, and the domestication of plants-animals followed. Religion, in other words, supposedly spurred the Neolithic Revolution and “civilization.”

These are extraordinary claims that have been challenged. In coming posts, we will look at Schmidt’s professional publications and recent reactions to them.

• Göbekli was built and used by nomadic hunter-gatherers rather than sedentary agriculturalists.
• It was a religious or ritual pilgrimage center that attracted people from far and wide.
• The massive stone structures or megaliths were “temples” or world’s earliest “churches.”
• It shows that complex organized religion preceded the domestication of plants and animals or Neolithic Revolution.

Why are these extraordinary claims? Because hunter-gatherers aren’t supposed to be doing these things and the order is wrong.

Before Göbekli, the consensus was that the domestication of the plants-animals was a condition precedent to the construction of megaliths and organized worship. After Göbekli, the causal arrows were supposedly reversed. If correct, this is heady stuff: it would mean that ideas and symbols led to or caused the single most important change in the history of humanity. There is no “civilization” without agriculture or food production.

Under the Göbekli scenario proposed by Schmidt and others, religion is not mere superstructure: it is base.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which Göbekli supposedly provides. But does it? In the October 2011 issue of Current Anthropology, University of Toronto archaeologist Edward Banning challenges the Göbekli claims. Banning’s article raises important questions about what has been found and how it has been interpreted.

Because the Göbekli claims and counterclaims are foundational, I will be covering them in a series of posts. In the first, we will look at the site itself and the extensive (sometimes sensational) press coverage, including interviews with Klaus Schmidt. In the second, we will examine Schmidt’s professional publications and site reports for Göbekli. In the third, we will look at the questions raised by Banning in “So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East.” Finally, we will assess the whole to determine whether the extraordinary Göbekli claims are supported by sufficient evidence.

Although Göbekli surely is not (as Spiegel suggested in a 2006 cover story) the lost Garden of Eden, its archaeological and historical importance is undeniable. By the end of the series, we should have a better fix on Göbekli and the claims surrounding it. Is Göbekli an archaeological or metaphorical Stairway to Heaven? I kid but watch the video anyway.

Reference:

Banning, E.B. (2011). So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East Current Anthropology, 52 (5), 619-660 DOI: 10.1086/661207

With this famous sentence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his masterful critique of political power. Less well known is another sentence from The Social Contract (1762): “No State has ever been founded without Religion serving as its base.”

My reading of history is that Rousseau was right. State-formation has always been accompanied and enabled by religion. If archaeologists have ever excavated an ancient or Neolithic city-state that did not clearly evince the marriage of power with religion, I am unaware of it.

When it comes to more recent city-states, such as Rome, we needn’t rely on archaeological evidence. The record is clear: Roman political power was inextricably linked to Roman civic religion. It is commonplace for historians to observe that the founding of Rome (~750 BCE) “is shrouded in myth.” While true, this is not the simple result of story accretion or faulty memory. The myths were deliberately created and deployed.

Rome’s early leaders knew perfectly well that political power required religious backing. As was so often the case, what Rome lacked it borrowed. Much of this borrowing came from Rome’s older, more powerful and sophisticated neighbor to the north: Etruria. Although Etruscan influence on Rome was considerable, it was most pronounced in the realm of religion. Dominique Briquel (open access) explains:

Such a state of affairs stems from the fact that, in their national religious heritage, the Etruscans had at their disposal a collection of ritual and divination practices of which the Romans knew no equivalent. A great many such rites were borrowed by Rome from her northern neighbours, who had developed them long before Rome felt any such need. The most famous of these was the foundation ritual of cities: it was unanimously admitted that when Romulus founded the city, he had recourse to Tuscan specialists.

It was in the all important realm of divination or haruspicy, however, that Rome felt the greatest need to borrow:

The Etruscans had developed a body of divinatory knowledge which permitted them, for example, to assign meaning to patterns of lightning (keraunoscopy), to decipher the indications contained in the liver or in other organs of sacrificial victims (hepatoscopy), and generally to understand why the gods provoked the whole array of unusual phenomena behind which supernatural intervention was perceived, designated by the term “prodigies” (prodigia). The Etruscans had carefully studied all of these, and they had devoted to them an entire specialized literature called, quite simply, the “Etruscan books.” (Briquel 2007:154).

Bronze "Liver" with Etruscan Inscriptions

There were several categories of such books which together formed a body of knowledge known as “Etrusca disciplina.” This choice of words sheds considerable light on Roman epistemology: “The term ‘discipline’ is important, since it shows that the ancients considered it a veritable science, which is the meaning of the word in Latin, even if it was used specifically in the domain of religion” (id.).

Here we have a nice example of J.G. Frazer’s contention that divinatory practices, which might be considered a form of “magic,” presaged later scientific notions of cause and effect. I find it telling that the formative Chinese dynasties employed similar divinatory practices and linked them to political power. What Frazer called “magic” was simply a form of supernaturalism that can be found, in one form or another, in all religions.

Reference:

Briquel, Dominique (2007). Tages Against Jesus: Etruscan Religion in Late Roman Empire Etruscan Studies, 10 (1), 153-161

While shamanic beliefs and practices may constitute “religions,” I prefer to reserve that term for the more organized and systematic forms of supernaturalism that emerge in conjunction with the Neolithic transition. My preferences in this regard are driven by the need for definitional and descriptive clarity, and do not constitute a normative judgment about whether a particular constellation of beliefs-practices deserves to be called a “religion.”

With this in mind, we can conceptualize the Paleolithic-Neolithic cleavage as follows:

Paleolithic Supernaturalism (50,000-10,000 years ago):

Hunter-Gatherers; Nomadic Foragers; Shamanic Supernaturalism; Individualized and Fluid Beliefs

Neolithic Religions (~10,000-2,500 years ago):

Agriculturalists; Sedentary Food Producers; Organized Religions; Communal and Systematic Beliefs

These are basic divisions and finer-grained distinctions can be made but this is a fundamental divide in the history of religions. It also constitutes a fundamental divide in human history.

At the heart of this divide is the shift from foraging to food producing, known as the process of Neolithicization. It occurred at different times in different places in different ways. It was a mosaic, uneven, and variable process that occurred over thousands of years. Although our understanding of this process is getting better all the time, there is no single convincing explanation and the debates are robust.

I mention all this because Current Anthropology has graciously posted about 20 recent open access articles on the Neolithic transition, including articles on the origins of agriculture in the Near East, Levant, Anatolia, Asia, China, India, Korea, Japan, Oceania, and America. This is a treasure trove of information on Neolithicization and a blessing for those who do not have institutional access to these kinds of articles. I don’t know how long these will remain open access, so download before the paywall goes back up!

Credit: David Steinlicht

Neolithic Revolution Cartoon