A Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in south-eastern Turkey, excavated from 1995 by Klaus Schmidt, whose oldest enclosures date to about 9600 BCE and whose T-shaped limestone pillars, some over five metres and carved with animals in relief, predate pottery, metal and the wheel. Schmidt’s reading, that the site was a sanctuary built by hunter-gatherers and that the labour of building it drove the adoption of agriculture rather than following from it, is the version that reached the general reader and the one the alternative literature relies on, including Heather Lynn, who cites the absence of domesticated plants and animals as evidence that symbolism and religion produced agriculture. That reading has since been contested from inside the discipline. E. B. Banning argued in Current Anthropology in 2011 that the enclosures may be houses rather than temples, and excavation since 2014, at Göbekli Tepe itself and at neighbouring sites such as Karahan Tepe, has recovered domestic architecture, cisterns and evidence of everyday occupation. Temple first is now one position in a live debate rather than the settled finding it is usually presented as, which is worth holding whenever the site is cited as an anomaly.
Connections
Lost Civilization Hypothesis · Ancient Apocalypse · Graham Hancock · Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis · Precession of the Equinoxes