Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe: The History of Neolithic Anatolia's Mysterious Religious Sites

The Neolithic period came before the Bronze Age and is generally regarded as the final subdivision of the Stone Age. During this time, communities domesticated plants and certain animals but still relied on hunting and gathering to a considerable extent, and beginning sometime around 7000 BCE, handmade pottery was developed, along with more advanced stone axes that enabled people to clear vast forests. Thanks to tools like that, the sizes of these Neolithic communities ranged from thousands to as few as a hundred, and they spread across the world with a variety of cultures and languages. One aspect these cultures had in common was that they relied on similar tools made of stone, wood, and bone.

Despite the fact some Neolithic communities grew to considerable sizes, they're typically not considered when people think of the first ancient civilizations or the first major cities, so when German archaeologists discovered the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s, it created an academic firestorm that is still raging. Far from being just another settlement, Göbekli Tepe has been described as the world's first temple and perhaps one of the locations where human civilization began. Subsequent archaeological work at Göbekli Tepe has revealed that the site was a spiritual center for the local population during a time when humans were undergoing a transition as hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic Period to a more sedentary lifestyle in the Neolithic Period, more than 10,000 years ago. Further research in the disciplines of anthropology, religion, and history indicate that the activity at Göbekli Tepe subsequently set the tone for elements of Neolithic and Bronze Age religion and ideology in the Near East, especially in Anatolia (roughly equivalent with modern Turkey).

Although many elements of Göbekli Tepe's history remain an enigma, and probably will in the future due to the nature of the source material, the relatively recent work at the site has helped historians speculate about how Near Eastern people lived in the Mesolithic Period, how those lifestyles evolved, and how they contributed to the history of the era.

Archaeologists have been able to determine when Karahan Tepe was built, possibly how long it was occupied, and that it was probably related to the larger, better-known site of Göbekli Tepe, but several important questions remain. What was the purpose of Karahan Tepe? Was Karahan Tepe a permanent or semi-permanent settlement? What was the background of the people who built the site, and how long did it take them to build it?

Karahan Tepe was just one of many sites in ancient modern Turkey, and as part of a greater complex, Karahan Tepe represents one of the earliest known attempts to build a complex society, so understanding more about the site can tell historians about how the process worked. Uncovering some of these mysteries can go far in understanding not just Karahan Tepe and nearby sites, but also the subsequent Bronze Age cultures in the Near East. However, since writing apparently didn't exist during the life of Karahan Tepe, many theories about it are hypothetical, leading to some fanciful and even outlandish hypotheses about Karahan Tepe and similar sites.

Either way, Karahan Tepe represented a step forward in human development, an enduring symbol of prehistoric organizational structures that were capable of channeling greater numbers of people and the resources needed to build stone structures.