One of the things I like best about Pantheacon is the opportunity to get up to date on new research and discoveries in research on ancient sites of interest to Pagans.  And few times are more ancient than Göbekli Tepe,  a ancient sacred site in Southeast Turkey that is over 12,000 years old, three times older than Stonehenge.  That is before the rise of either agriculture or pottery, and during the last ice age, when glacier still dominated much of Europe and North America.  The first presentation was in 2006, shortly after it had been discovered, and its amazing age determined.  Yesterday we got an update.  or great photos, see here.

On a high hill top Neolithic hunters and gatherers gradually built a complex of circular structures of stone megaliths, each highly shaped and in many cases with carved animals no longer present on them.  No dwellings have been found anywhere close to these ruins, and archaeologists estimate they took at least 500 people to build, over a considerable period of time.  After centuries of use they then covered it up with soil carried to the top, where the stones and other artifacts remained undiscovered until only a few years ago.

Coming upon these ruins shortly after their being discovered by German archaeologists, our presenters had themselves doing research on the possibility that modern Paganism had its roots in Harran, a fascinating city near this region.  But that’s for another day.  When they first visited the site was open to the few visitors who knew bout it, though as the word has since spread, visitors can no longer go up to the stones themselves.

Today members of the “Frew Expedition” presented an up to date report on the most recent discoveries, many still only published in German and Turkish, including the discovery of stone rings of different sizes, some very large, more carvings, and the excavation of villages nearly as old in the surrounding country, each with a circle of  smaller stone megaliths. But it will take years to excavate this site, let alone come to a more complete understanding of what happened here.

What we know is amazing enough.  The region must have been very rich in plants and animals, even though it is a near wasteland now.  The chief meat source, to judge from bones, was gazelles.  There were no domesticated animals beyond, perhaps, dogs. The quantities of animals needed to sustain villages able to provide so much labor was immense.  The only wheat found on the site is wild wheat, agriculture not yet having been established.  It must have been a rich land indeed.

Today it is barren, essentially one vast and eroded region of chalk, with what soil remains hidden in small areas able to support a little grass.  Lit tleexists now except for the ruins on top, except for vast eroded hills of chalk.

Göbekli Tepe or nearby is possibly where agriculture originated.  The demands for food from settled villages able to perform this much labor likely did great damage to the local ecology.  As animal and bird life declined, people would have looked for substitutes, and the wild wheat of the area is ancestral to today’s wheat.  We also know the first evidence of domesticated wheat stems from shortly after this site was built.  Agriculture did not lead to settlement, settlement led to agriculture.

The very barrenness of the region, settled for such an immense period, also warns us of the adverse ecological impact of human settlements lacking a means to see the damage they are doing to their environment.  Glenn Turner who was one of those who had gone observed “everything has been scoured.”  The decline would have been slow, as soil was washed away from the hills over millennia of agriculture and the grazing of goats.  Each generation on average would have seen only a small change for the worse.  

I have a renewed appreciation for the value of writing and photography, that we may better grasp the dire impact we are having on our world ecologically. Whether it will be enough to reverse our record, time alone will tell.

Today, as is becoming better known, many groups are trying to incorporate the discovery into their own imagined pasts.  The most common is that this was the Garden of Eden.  In one way this makes some sense, for once it was a place of enormous productivity, now gone, though there is a marked shortage of angels with flaming swords to keep us from visiting.  Be careful of the information you find on the web, though the pictures are wonderful.  The areas excavation has only just begin and there is much more to be discovered.