[MomsAVoxell]

The Tepe sites are really fascinating. Every discovery leads to so many more questions - how did they construct these sites, what were they using some of the structures for, and so on.

At Karahan Tepe is the pit full of pillars, with the human-face head on the outer rim .. whenever I see this pit, I get a picture in my mind that the entire site was green and fertile, and this pit was filled with water. It would be the ideal device to teach kids to swim - and so on. It's such a fascinating human discovery - the mind serious wanders.

I encourage anyone who is new to this subject to let the imagination run wild. What kinds of people could create these T-shaped pillars, carve them, use them in their building construction .. and then some day, decide to cover it all up with rubble and stone, to be buried for millennia and discovered by some strange, future civilisation.

It makes me wonder what, 12,500 years from now, of our own crazy civilisation might be unearthed, and strange new utility assigned to their purposes ..

[itopaloglu83]

To me, it looks like a festival ground, so I imagine people coming from all directions and multiple nomad tents etc. around it.

What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.

Maybe these were one off sites with limited use and were later just left alone, while anything in Egypt had continuous settlements so things just eroded over time, with the things like pyramids as exceptions.

[AlotOfReading]

We find similarly old structures across Eurasia, like the epigravettian mammoth bone huts. The late PPNA when KT/GT were seemingly built is when we find the first monumental, stone structures that we know of. It's entirely possible that ancient near east is where these kinds of things were first built. There's reasons I can go into why that's thought to be the case, but we can't rule out that there could be a streetlight effect happening. The ANE is where we expect to find this sort of early structure, and it's also one of the most heavily studied areas alongside North America and Europe. North Africa, particularly Tunisia where there's already a number of known epipaleolithic sites, is substantially less accessible for this kind of research.

To directly answer your question though, the Tas Tepler sites survived because they were buried and the locations they're in are pretty bad places for people to live today. They're way up on hills around the urfa/harran plain where there's outcroppings of the stone used to build them, but also without water. People seemingly just carried water up the hills from cisterns farther down. The locations of those cisterns also suggest that there may be further sites we haven't found, because some of them don't correspond to anything we know of.

[lumost]

To what extent is our understanding of this period limited by survivorship? Granite doesn't weather significantly, so we see lots of metalithic stone structures with ambiguous dating. The near east had significant changes in inland climates so we find ancient cities that were not built over there. Soft rock/mud Brick structures can survive in dry climates - so we see evidence of the oldest civilizations in deserts.

Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.

[AlotOfReading]

Short answer: it's hard to fully say, but most people believe that the holocene is a lower bound on this sort of thing. I'll try to explain, but keep in mind that I'm trying to massively simplify a huge field of open questions.

The fundamental assumption underlying most archaeology is that changes in material culture broadly reflect people reacting to the world around them in intelligent ways. Most archaeologists therefore believe that Pleistocene people didn't build permanent structures out of stone because nomadic or seminomadic lifestyles were more optimal for the chaotic pleistocene environments happening globally. There's a few people who disagree with the universality of this idea, most famously the authors of Dawn of Everything who argue for a more diverse family of lifeways in early humans, but that's just quibbling about the edges of this overall narrative rather than rewriting it.

And we'd expect to have more evidence than we do if the holocene boundary wasn't the effective start date for this kind of structure. Cave environments are much more stable, and it's where much of our evidence comes from. Gobekli Tepe (GT) and other Tas Tepler sites are made with local limestone, an extremely erosion-prone rock. We have sites covered by existing urban cities like Jericho, the earliest layers of which date from around the same time as GT. We also have older structures, like the epigravittean mammoth huts, and a fairly good idea of the forager->farmer transition in the near east across the natufian culture. GT is actually thought to be part of that transition.

But yes, a lot of organic stuff from the pleistocene is gone. Organics were probably the dominant form of material used, so that leaves a huge gap we're still struggling with. Not really sure where I'm going with this, so I guess I'll stop here?

[nemomarx]

Thank you for this thoughtful explanation

Do you think recent findings about early human sites on other continents (Americas etc) change any of this, or does that still mostly fit with our understanding? My layman's knowledge is that the exact date of when people reached certain landmasses shifts around based on new evidence but I'm not sure if that's an important part of the timeline generally

[AlotOfReading]

No, those are different topics. The current evidence for the initial peopling of the Americas is particularly problematic because we don't have a great narrative for how those dates could work.

[biotinker]

> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts.

As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.

The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayside_Inn_%28Sudbury%29

[gerdesj]

Some years back an aunt and uncle owned a cottage in Devon (near Exeter) with 1649 carved into the wall by the front door.

Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, often with a "cat slide" and foundations are laughable.

The thatch needs replacing something like every 25-50 years. Cob needs patching, especially if the roof leaks (not replaced on schedule) and it starts rotting. However all this stuff happens gradually and it can be repaired gradually too in most cases, as and when you like and within budget.

A concrete structure ... let's say Charles Cross multi-storey car park in Plymouth ... well hello concrete cancer! OK this is a bit different to the cottage but let's see how the "modern" world has progressed with a building material that was used by the old Romans and likely before.

A concrete beam on its own is "quite" good as a supporting material. Conc is superb in compression and quite good in tension. In a horizontal beam when you put a load on it, the top will be compressed and the bottom will be in tension. Think about a wide thin rectangle and imagine pushing down on it. Imagine it bending into a U shape - the top side will be compressed and the bottom will be stretched (tension). That's a fairly simplified model!

Now, cast your concrete beam around a long steel bar and put nuts and washers on both ends and tighten them so that the entire beam is in tension. There are other methods to do this but this is easier to envision.

Now you have locked in a lot of energy into the system. The upside of "pre-stressed" concrete is that a given beam ("member") cross section can carry a lot more weight than a non pre-stressed member. The down side is that deliberate demolition is really hard and non deliberate demolition is possible.

So, that concrete cancer thing. Conc cancer is caused when salty sea air and moisture (rather likely in Plymouth) permeates conc made from Portland cement. Its more complicated than that but the sea salts are key. The conc gradually degrades in a rather strange way - map cracking and a gel develops in the cracks (I think, I studied this stuff quite a while back). The usual conc matrix ends up with weak lines running through it.

Anyway - you have energy locked up in members and those members are failing. Boom!

There is a lot to be said for old school materials and practices.

[physicsguy]

These almshouses are near where my father lives, and are fairly unremarkable: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1...

[WalterBright]

> cast your concrete beam around a long steel bar and put nuts and washers on both ends and tighten them so that the entire beam is in tension.

I think you meant "compression".

[zelphirkalt]

PPNA? KT? GT? ANE?

[arnsholt]

KT is obviously (from context here) Karahan Tepe, and GT thus Göbleki Tepe. ANE is a standard abbreviation for Ancient Near East. For PPNA Wikipeda supplies Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, which is a subdivision of the Early Neolithic period.

[MomsAVoxell]

>What makes me wonder is that why did these hills survive, and why are we not finding similar things in north Africa and other civilization cradles.

In my honest, personally informed opinion, there is much to be said for ignorance of the subject - and I don't mean you personally, just generally - at large - human cultures have a very intractable level of mystery, among our languages and human history, as a whole.

In anticipation of this fact, I personally invest myself in certain mysteries. The Tepe civilisation is one - but the things to be learned at Narwala Gabarnmang, are .. personally, I admit .. astonishing.

We do in fact have tens of thousands of years of human history to comprehend.

The issue is, we rapidly discard a lot of it in the rush to preserve just a bit of it.

[goobatrooba]

While humans and the first basis of culture evolved in Africa, many of the key cultural/technological innovations happened outside Africa, notably the invention of agriculture and pastoralism which happened 3-6 times independently (modern Turkey, China (possibly twice) and South America, possibly in addition also in Iran and India).

So if you look at Africa it stayed for the longest times with hunter & gatherer cultures until neolithic settlers came back into Africa from modern Turkey.

Moreover Africa in large parts is either moist or desert/savannah, both of which do not help preservation. And there are simply much fewer archaeologists going around Africa.

[dismalaf]

> north Africa

Possibly covered by the Sahara, or if we're talking along the coast, underwater. Or covered by current settlements.

> other civilization cradles.

Because people still live there and built on top.

[Tuna-Fish]

The interesting places to find new archaeological sites are places where we know there were lots of people nearby, and where for some reason human habitation ceased and the sites were preserved.

I hold some hope for new methods of underwater archaeology to uncover sites on the southern coast of the Black Sea and in the Persian Gulf. The latter especially because it was vast, rich floodplain during the last glacial maximum, and the oldest known true cities sprouted into existence on it's northern shore pretty much instantly after it flooded. I like to think that the oldest city ever built lies submerged in mud and water somewhere in there, just waiting to be found.

(Not that there would be necessarily much to find anymore, they probably didn't build out of rock.)

[engineer_22]

As I understand it, Tepe is local word for tel. Climate in this region makes them easy to distinguish since not a lot of plant cover making it easier to identify potential sites? Fertile crescent floods. Nile floods. Unique geography and climate in Turcep key to this?

[mrighele]

"Tepe" is just a Turkish word for hill or mound.

So "Göbekli Tepe" literally is "Hill with a belly", "Taş Tepeler" is "Stone hills" etc.

[itsnowandnever]

it was definitely a festival ground for (relatively) nearby complex semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers to meet up occasionally. I had a professor describe it as a pre-historic UN where these clans would meet up and feast but I think festival ground is an even better analogy

[alephnerd]

> why did these hills survive

Because it's low density arid scrubland that is primarily inhabited by Kurdish and Turkish herders, and was a no-go zone during the PKK Insurgency.

[Cthulhu_]

It really depends on whether we're going to go through dark ages or a mass extinction event to the point of all our archives being destroyed; if that doesn't happen, we can look up discoveries on wikipedia. If there are any discoveries being made, because the thing with archeology is that things have to have been buried and forgotten about for a long time - grave sites, basements, that kind of thing.

I get it though, it'd be interesting to consider it, but like I said we'd need to forget things first for a long time. But another thing to consider is that the ancient Egyptians had archeologists for ancient Egyptian stuff already, with their history going back from 3000 BC to 30 AD.

[foobarian]

The fact that there was a skeleton in one of the rectangular-ish holes made me think it was a burial ground, with the obelisk as the headstone. But I am not an archeologist so idk

[christkv]

My favorite thought experiment is what will they think when they dig up bodies and find silicon implants. What cultural significance will they attribute too it.

[pyuser583]

We dig up ancient bodies with prosthetics. We usually interpret them as replacing an injured body part.

[anentropic]

Was it really a pit back then, or that's just a result of how it's been subsequently excavated?