Working Smarter, not Harder at Gobekli Tepe

There's a new blog post at the Gobekli Tepe blog -- the website created and maintained by the researchers excavating the site. This post discusses the making and transport of the pillars that make up the site and is probably going to be interesting to those discussing how Egyptians moved and mined the blocks for the Great Pyramid.

It turns out that a lot of the blocks at GT weigh about as much as the blocks of the Great Pyramid. Like the Egyptians, they quarried stone that was close to the site they were building and like the Egyptians, there's unfinished work in those quarries.

The most interesting find was that they used the properties of limestone itself (which forms in nice layers, often a hard layer alternating with some softer layers) to create the stone blocks. They'd go to the edge of the plateau, find a lengthy seam of limestone, and simply chip it into block sized lumps (think of using the edge of a cake to make slices for everyone rather than cutting slices by digging a hole in the middle of the cake and cutting from there).

Details, discussion, papers, references at the blog

a reply to: Byrd

Who where these people and why did they build it.. Wasn't long ago that historians would have denied this complexity of culture so far back in time. .. Requires a lot of skills and man power to do something like this.

That’s cool. Thanks Byrd

a reply to: Byrd

i keep returning to the Builders of GT being a group of sophisticated Engineers, and conscripting and army of Workers to construct then bury the Project in a span of 1/2 a generation

your OP points out the keen insights the builders had of limestone, hunter-gatherers/farmers-ranchers would not be so savvy on Astronomy or civil Engineering

there were counterparts to the modern era Elites with plans for the masses back then ? seems so !

Maybe they buried it deliberately as it didn’t work any more, the star alignments had moved over time.

Maybe they dug more of them ( so many enclosures still under the ground ) to try and track something or to try and plot a fixed point .
Maybe they were abandoning them like the Malta star temples (Sirius,I think) , or was it Sardinia, can’t remember - when they ‘ran out’ and didn’t work any more, they just built another one that lasted x years , then another , then another …
Who knows. We won’t for a couple of decades at least I imagine.. a lot of Tas Tepeler sites appearing all the time
and GT is massive .a reply to: St Udio

a reply to: Byrd

Turkey has built visitor centre, footpath's and other tourist crap on top of unexcavated parts of the site locking them off and likely damaging them.

Money is more important it seems than any truths this site may have told.

originally posted by: purplemer
a reply to: Byrd

Who where these people and why did they build it.. Wasn't long ago that historians would have denied this complexity of culture so far back in time. .. Requires a lot of skills and man power to do something like this.

A group with the not-very-romantic name of "Pre-pottery Neolithic A" and continued by PPNB. They were early settlers and did have villages. Wikipedia

Interesting and amazing, but in at least one encyclopedia I read when I was young (pre 1970), mention was made of villages/settlements dating to 10,000 BC. So nothing astonishing, really. Interesting and exciting and delightful, yes, but not beyond the range of what we know.

There's been a recent find of a "factory" for obsidian stone tools (a big, organized processing area with different stages of tools) that dates to 1.2 million years ago -- most people aren't aware of this stuff unless you read a lot of archaeology news. So many here would think archaeologists/historians/etc would dismiss the idea of permanent/semipermanent homes of that age... but nobody who reads a lot of these papers would be terribly surprised to find semipermanent or even permanent tiny villages going back farther than 10,000 or even 15,000 years.

originally posted by: St Udio


i keep returning to the Builders of GT being a group of sophisticated Engineers, and conscripting and army of Workers to construct then bury the Project in a span of 1/2 a generation

your OP points out the keen insights the builders had of limestone, hunter-gatherers/farmers-ranchers would not be so savvy on Astronomy or civil Engineering

There's not a lot to be savvy about, and the idea that it's astronomical is not one that's supported (we don't know the purpose. We hope more excavation will make it clearer.) Hunter-gatherers and farmer ranchers need to know the seasons (which were often marked by constellations rising), and would be aware of them.

After all, if you plant at the wrong time, your crop is lost. And if you don't know when and where animals are likely to gather during mating season, you aren't going to be getting a lot of meat for your people.

I have always been fascinated by all these ancient structures, in my mind I follow The Ancient Alien Theory, is not way in hell that primitive man created all the structures now scattered all over the globe with just stone tools.

Ancient Mayans were a big trader of obsidian, I remember watching a documentary of it.

The Maya may have had an obsidian trading market, but there weren't any Maya during the PPN.

Harte

originally posted by: marg6043
I have always been fascinated by all these ancient structures, in my mind I follow The Ancient Alien Theory, is not way in hell that primitive man created all the structures now scattered all over the globe with just stone tools.

Ancient Mayans were a big trader of obsidian, I remember watching a documentary of it.

Obsidian's a volcanic stone, so it's found all over the world.

And the problem with the AAT is that you are led to believe that all these things are of the same age and that the only option the people had was "stone." Neither of these things is true.