00:00.00 kinkella Hello and welcome back to the pseudo archeology podcast episode 113 and we've been talking about gobekle te a a famous site in the near east in modern day turkey now how can we understand this this place that this place that. On the surface doesn't seem to make sense because it's a hunter gathertherer site but they're making big structures. How does this organization happen if you only have very lightly organized hunter gatherers. Well to understand that we want to have a feeling for the neolithic now. The neolithic is. The time period from which this is from neolithic means new stone neo means new lithic means stone right? and this is part of the very old way but we still use it in terms of how we divide up. What you could call the stone age right? as opposed to the bronze age and iron age again. This stuff is only for the old world if you're talking about europe or the Middle East or Africa right in those areas you can you can use this. This doesn't work at all for the new world. So. When we talk about the various stages. We have the paleolithic the mesolithic and the neolithic so the paleolithic is the old stone age paleo means old and these are going to be the time of the first stone tools this is going to be very early in in human history, right? the. 01:33.35 kinkella Paleolithic and the stone tools will be quite simple then in the middle you have the mesolithic meso meaning middle to middle stone age and then which brings us to the neolithic the new stone age notice I didn't give you guys dates on that. These time periods are largely defined by what happens in them. The stone tool technology in them. So the the dates vary a lot depending on where in the world. You are how you're defining it and so on. But if we do want to worry about dates. What I would say is for the neolithic the date of like 8000 bc that's really early right? That's right at the early edge of the neolithic. So go Backley Tepe is in very early days of the neolithic but in terms of the technology in terms of what they're doing It's very neolithic and cultural style if that makes sense. It's very complex. So we again are focusing on the culture more than the date now. The neolithic is also easily actually I don't want to say that let me do this little bit again. The neolithic is also known for the neolithic revolution right? I think we've. 03:03.63 kinkella Many of us have heard that before and it's such a bummer I actually hate this name the neolithic revolution because you're like new stone revolution and it has nothing to do with stone tools really that's farming the neolithic revolution equals farming or animal domestication. Right? This kind of stuff but it's largely this idea of farming also what comes with the neolithic revolution is the idea of settled villages. You'll hear settled village life right? So this is the idea that at this time during the neolithic that early humans. Finally settled down and started farming now the classic chicken egg argument in archeology is which came first the village or the farming and the short answer is who knows and it depends. You know and does it really matter because they both sort of work together right? So once you're choosing one you kind of naturally go for the other and vice versa. So what we have here with Gobeck Lee Tepe is a site that's. Straddles the world between a hunter gathertherer landscape a hunter gatherer ideology and a settled farming ideology and I'd love sites like this. It's the opposite of what you would think an archeologist would say and I'm sure that most archaeologists would agree with me. 04:37.98 kinkella Because it's so fascinating right? It's right on that ragged edge. It also shows us that a very simple model of human history is not Enough. There's a lot of other variation here and again we've known this for decades but the oversimplified idea that. Hunters and gatherers just cruised around the landscape and then one weekend they were like hey this farming thing looks pretty good and they just put their hunting tools aside and then built some huts to live in and started a village right? That's not reasonable. There has to be in between situations situations where people still do a lot of hunting and where hunting informs how they get food week by week and month by month but they're also starting to do more ah intensive farming techniques. If you think of farming of course that's not going to happen overnight. There has to be In-betweens and so with this setup of this early neolithic place of gobeckly tepe I Think what you're really seeing is a place where they are still hunting and gathering. But they're also practicing practicing what I like to call horticulture right? You can call it early agriculture if you really want. But what's happening is they are um, finding staple food crops and kind of. 06:08.59 kinkella Planting them Nearby. They're planting other crops nearby I Like to think of horticulture as the art and science of gardening right? You're you're not, You're not growing fields of wheat yet. But your. Starting this farming thing you're growing what you like you're going to start growing stuff. That's maybe hard to find you know you don't where you don't want to traips out into the natural world for hours and hours to try and find a certain plant you grow it next to your house or next to your settlement where you are staying. Right? It all it all makes sense it all kind of goes together. So we're looking at this kind of very interesting inbetween time now this brings us to the structure of Gobeck late Tepi itself. How did these people make something like this of. Course it was made communally right? This is a big stones like this to move that stuff. It needed a lot of cooperation and you know was this a society that had a leader or something like that I would think so but. This is of course not a state level Society. So This is some sort of Village Life. You know of that level of society if that makes sense of that level of complexity with some sort of central organization where. 07:36.76 kinkella Ah, maybe a ah central um family member elder or this kind of thing could get other families and other groups together in order to work together and make this thing in terms of what these. Ah. Circular enclosures actually are what do they symbolize? What do they mean? welcome to the hard part of archeology right? I am not here to tell you that I know precisely what these are or what they mean and i. I can give you educated guesses but you may be wondering at this point why I even bring up go becklet te a for the pseudo archeology podcast because so far it's been like hey can kello we've really talked about go beckley tepe as a cool archaeology site. This is where. My reasoning comes in because you have pseudo archeologists who interpret this completely and correctly and use it to try and prove silly and foolish ideas. So we don't want to lose sight of the fact that this is in. Amazing structure made by an early neolithic group made communally and I think of it. Um I think this area of Gobec like tepe would have been their communal structures that would have been used for. 09:09.80 kinkella Both ritual purposes and domestic purposes. What I mean is at certain times these would have been used for ah like religious rituals and this kind of thing but at other times they will been used for secular things everyday things like think of um, a gymnasium at a school or something like that. A gymnasium could be used for church services. You know, but a gymnasium can also be used to play a basketball game in the structure itself can be repurposed for different activities may they be more ritual or may they be more secular and. This is my my guess on this now. It is very difficult. This is a toughie man and this is also where it reminds me of stonehenge a bit like you. You know you you can't say for sure and the structure itself is so interesting you want to, but you got to be scientific about it. I will also say that. Based on the structure itself. It really looks like it was built over generations. So gobekli tepe was built over a very long time. This is not something they put up in 10 years you know this was built slowly over time added on to you have these different circular enclosures again I believe there's 6 and they started with one. They do another one and it. Continues over a very long long time now as I've set this up for you this place in the early neolithic um the change that the inbetween between hunter gathering and a. 10:42.75 kinkella Settled village life um, does go becklet tepe fit into modern archeology. Yes, totally and it's great and we love go becklet tepe. It's such an interesting site that shows this mixture and. What I find fascinating about so many places in the world is you see this kind of thing versions of it actually quite a bit and what I mean by that is there are so many different ways that human beings live across the earth so many different choices that they make that you will find moments where. Hunting and gathering the cliche of hunting and gathering and the cliche of farming kind of come together where cultures do both and they do it over time because it's a good choice because both work together. Why stop one for the other if you're still getting food from both of them. You know so you see it culturally a lot but in terms of ah, a very simple models about talking about the ancient past it feels like they don't fit in. It feels like everything needs to go either in the hunter gatherer box or the village life with farming box. And it's not like that. There's multiple boxes with different percentages of this in each so that's what makes this site. So great right? And it's oh this is you know 10000 years old even eleven and a half thousand that's 12:15.95 kinkella That's pretty good for something like this man I Just can't get over it I I I Just dig this site I I hate myself because I actually don't teach it in my intro to archeology class now intro to archeology I really have to pick and choose because it goes by fast and I have to. Hit all kinds of highs. But for the last couple years I've been like how can I wiggle go back Lay tap a in there. You know and I I promise you world that one of these days I will with that said when we come back. How gobeckli tepe relates to the Pseudo archeology crowd.