CMEAC Symposium. Joshua Mills. March 7-8 2013. Paper 07

Göbekli Tepe and Enclosure D:
To Domesticate the Wild, They First Captured Its Image

Written by:
Joshua Mills
School of Art & Art History, The University of Oklahoma

Presented at:
CMEAC Symposium
College of Architecture
The University of Oklahoma
March 7-8 2013

Göbekli Tepe is a Neolithic era, Megalithic group of structures located in Turkey. The site dates from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (12,000 BP) to around 8.2K years old, when the site was inexplicably abandoned and covered with backfill from the surrounding area. Although extensive excavations have taken place since its discovery in 1995, archaeologists have only begun to scratch the surface of this site and can only make conjectures as to its function within Neolithic society.

This thesis addresses the lacuna in research and understanding; drawing conclusions as to the purpose of the megalithic t-shaped pillars, sometimes anthropomorphized and adorned with animals carved in relief. Suppositions are made about the people who accomplished this great feat of social engineering and planning. Those who constructed Göbekli Tepe were an advanced culture, which was organized and capable of presenting their natural world in pictorial representation. Through visual representation, they symbolically domesticated nature. Göbekli Tepe stands as a time capsule to one of the most important transitional periods in history; an epoch marking a time when people learned to domesticate nature and in turn domesticated themselves.