Earlier last month the World Neolithic Congress was held at Harran University in Şanliurfa, Turkey. If I’d heard about the event sooner, I would have submitted a paper, but I attended. The congress was originally set for China but was cancelled due to Covid. Last year it was being arranged for Turkey but was cancelled again following the earthquakes. It was a terrific and memorable weeklong event and, in terms of archaeology conferences, unique if not historic. Apparently just under 1000 attended and the lectures focused neolithics on a global scale not just Anatolia. Highlights, for me, included an evening reception and concert at Şanliurfa’s ever-expanding archaeology museum on Monday and site visits on Wednesday. For the latter, the total head count was split into 4 or 5 groups which visited sites alternately. Ours visited Göbekli Tepe, Sayburç, Çakmak Tepe, Gürcü Tepe, Sefer Tepe and Karahan Tepe in that order.
On Monday Necmi Karul, a key Taš Tepeler coordinator, spoke to a crowded class on Karahan Tepe and special buildings. Karul attempts to look beyond the traditional shrine vs settlement debate and suggests the Taš Tepeler sites would be better conceived as ‘cultural zones’ where large special buildings, surrounded by smaller domestic structures, were multi-functional and an important component of settlements. He nevertheless asserts that the sites were not primarily religious. Older parts of Karahan Tepe are now dated to 9400 BCE which makes it more cognate with Göbekli Tepe. Notwithstanding the revised date, I still think Karahan was outpost to Göbekli not only because of its haggard architecture resembling Pre-Pottery Neolithic B phases but in terms of its location being less “central” during its own time. The phallic pillar building named Str. AB has attracted further observation about the water it theoretically held filtering from it into a cistern structure located in the larger Str. AD. Going by the height of the fissure in Str. AB’s southern wall, its water level must have reached quite high (virtually swimmable) levels when full if this was the case. However, Karul remains confident that Str. AB facilitated rites of passage of some kind. I remain convinced that, with or without water, the chamber mimicked a subterranean environment. Two American archaeologists I overheard checking the structure out on the day we visited summed it up: ‘yeah, it’s kinda strange, ain’t it’.
The religious vs domestic interpretation of these sites goes back to Klaus Schmidt and Ted Banning and diverging debate over the extent of this contrast will clearly be a mainstay. I briefly met Ted at the congress. After lunch on Friday, we both attended a lecture teasingly titled ‘Impersonal Powers in Göbekli Tepe: Temples as Cosmic Houses’ which sadly got cancelled at the last minute…
Images below of the remarkable stone face, serpentine channel (with fissure opposite), stone plates and vulture figurine from Karahan Tepe. Entering the narrow-valleyed, stony-hilled location at sundown was a haunting experience.
Another site visited on Wednesday was Çakmak Tepe first professionally excavated in 2021 and subject to illegal looting slightly before. Though definitely not as spectacular as other Taš Tepeler sites it’s estimated to be 1000 years older than Göbekli Tepe and a cultural precursor to it. What’s especially interesting about it in that respect is a large special building type structure approximately 16 meters wide carved out of the bedrock (like Karahan, for example) described by its excavator, who was present, as ‘amphitheatre like’ (seance, theatre, initiation, hunting lesson?) Çakmak Tepe’s projected age puts it in line with the Epipalaeolithic Boncuklu Tarla much farther East in the Upper Tigris but unlike Boncuklu it’s located in the Taš Tepeler heartland. Another site named Mendiktepe related to it is very close. Unlike other sites, Çakmak Tepe’s elevated platform opens to the North, seen in the final image.
On Friday, Eylem Özdoğan, who oversees Sayburç excavations, spoke on graphic manifestations of prehistory, their underlying narratives and the creation of memory in changing worlds.
The last time I visited Sayburç, a house stood virtually on top of the relief which has since been revealed as the northern-end of a typical Taš Tepeler enclosure replete with central twin pillars now absent. Interestingly, Romans are known to have occupied the site; they installed a cistern in the western end of the relief building meaning they might have been exposed to its iconography. The Sayburç relief is an intriguing example of what Assyriologists for 100 years have called the ‘Gilgamesh figure’ and what anthropologists more generically refer to as animal masters. Özdoğan views the relief, which shows a man flanked by leopards (a Taš Tepeler fauna with significant relation to humans) and another man dancing or fighting with a bull, as an unfolding scene in a story with one or more events being told. While I doubt anybody would take issue with that, she also mentioned, in passing, that graphic story scenes began in the Neolithic; that cave art had meaning only in its creation. Clearly, her assertion would rely too heavily on theories that see cave paintings as art process only which, like other cave art theories, go in and out of fashion a lot.
I recall the Sayburç relief surfacing in 2021 while researching a paper, a segment of which went on to suggest the two men as representations of twin pillars acting out a narrative, one ultimately related to the larger myth Enclosure D iconography portrays fragmentally. Given architectural contexts, symbolic themes of underworld encounter (fairly common in twin/brother myths) would have hubbed at least some of the special social events these buildings hosted.
In terms of myth characters, during our reception at the archaeological museum on Monday I noticed a bull design on the inner belt of the Pillar 31 mock-up I’d not seen before (some designs on the wider model are figurative). The original does indeed feature a faintly etched aurochs enforcing the idea of the pillar enshrining a ‘wild bull man’ type. One of the bull’s notable exploits in this arena appears to have been battling a giant snake, shown on Pillar 20.
On my way to the congress shuttle stop early Monday morning, recuperating from a night flight, I thought what a schlep an entire week would be. Come Friday it had all passed too soon.