Göbekli Tepe: Fantastic Beasts and Prehistoric Mysteries

Göbekli Tepe is a Neolithic site in south-east Anatolia dated to the local Pre-Pottery Neolithic, between c. 9500 and 8000 BCE. It is a monumental complex built on the top of a rocky hill, comprising a number of large circular structures supported by massive stone pillars, many richly decorated with abstract anthropomorphic forms, clothing, and reliefs of wild animals. Recent fieldwork has shown that it is only one of several pillared sites in the region, each promising to yield similar remarkable discoveries.

The scale of construction and the labour involved is unprecedented for the time and place and challenges interpretations of West Asian prehistoric development. A range of possible interpretations of the ‘pillared buildings’ phenomenon has been raised but unsurprisingly, given the remarkable nature of the sites, they are still very much a subject of debate.

In this talk Lee Clare, in charge of current excavations at Göbekli Tepe, will present the most recent findings on the site.

Lee Clare studied prehistoric archaeology at the University of Cologne from 1997 to 2013. Following the completion of his PhD in Cologne in 2013 (Rapid Climate Change in the Late Neolithic of the Eastern Mediterranean), he accepted a post-doctoral position in the Göbekli Tepe Research Projec with Klaus Schmidt at the German Archaeological Institute (Orien Department). Following K. Schmidt’s death in 2014, he took over the coordination of the same project.

In 2020, he was appointed research lecturer (Referent) for prehistoric archaeology at the German Archaeological Institute (Istanbul Department). In addition to his work at Göbekli Tepe, he has worked at archaeological sites in Germany, Bulgaria Jordan and Namibia. His research interests include the Neolithic, absolute chronologies, climate-culture interactions and cognitive archaeology.