Gobekli Tepe Case Study

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1. Gobekli Tepe is located in southeastern Turkey and it is a temple that is arranged with massive stone pillars into ring sets. The pillars are created from “cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with animal remains” (Mann 1). Scattered around the area of the pillars, Klaus Schmidt, a researcher, found many Neolithic tools, such as choppers, projectile points, and knives which was used by the many people needed to establish and carve the pillars. Many people would’ve needed to came together at this one site, and many of the temple’s builders had and were able to “cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite having no wheels or beasts of burden” (Mann 1). Gobekli Tepe has three levels, and Schmidt examined the structures …show more content…
The conception and construction of Gobekli Tepe was not beyond the intellectual capabilities of Homo sapiens because it was evident in the pillars that there was some sophistication and decoration on it, as well as many animals used to enhance the pillars. The temple builders at Gobekli Tepe were hunter gatherers, or foragers, and hunter gatherers are typically a hundred people or so living together, and they had to move around quite often because they had to look for food to sustain. Schmidt explains that usually hunter gatherers cannot build such a big, permanent complex structure, as well as maintaining “a separate class of priests and craft workers, because they can’t carry around all the extra supplies to feed them. Then here is Gobekli Tepe, and they obviously did that” (Mann 3). The people at Gobekli Tepe broke the definition of hunter gatherers that researchers labeled. Schmidt hypothesizes the reason why the pillars started to become less sophisticated and not as big in comparison to the beginning where the temple builders put a lot of effort into the construction, it is because the hunter gatherers would only use the site for “seasonal religious pilgrimages” (Banning 632). An example from lecture that shows Homo sapiens in the same general time period that built a site in Jericho. In Jericho, people built walls during the Neolithic period, and it was like the Gobekli Tepe in there was a lot of team effort to build the structure. Some researchers thought

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