10,000 Grinding Stones Found at Göbekli Tepe: A Centre of Food Processing? | Ancient Architects

The more you read and learn about the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the more you’re surprised about just how advanced post-Younger Dryas Hunter-Gatherer communities were in Ancient Anatolia.

These people were planning large projects and completing them to extremely high standards, which shows organisation within communities. But at Gobekli Tepe, there are still no signs of domesticated grains and so full-scale agriculture was still a future development.

Still, many commentators suggest Göbekli Tepe could not have been the work of mere hunter-gatherers, even though the evidence suggests otherwise. I believe we now need to stop thinking in a binary fashion, that there were Hunter-gatherers and then farmers. There is the grey area in between and Göbekli Tepe and many Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites fall into this. You could say that these people were like proto-farmers.

It is also now known that Göbekli Tepe was a permanent settlement, but more akin to a village, than a city, but there is still something very unusual about it. There are more domestic finds than anyone expected, far more than necessary and evidence may therefore suggest Göbekli Tepe was a centre for large-scale food processing 11-11,500 years ago.

Learn more by watching the video, and also find out more about what was being processed and what people were eating in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

A lot of the information in the video comes from the incredible website https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/ This weblog gives an insight into ongoing excavations and archaeological research at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey and is written and created by the archaeologists that work on the site.

Many of the photographs belong to the German Archaeological Institute and are credited to K. Schmidt, DAI, N. Becker, DAI, D. Johannes, DAI, I. Wagner, O. Dietrich and L. Dietrich. I have used these images as they are the only ones available and they are used for educational purposes only to encourage people to take an interest in the subject of their work. I would urge you to visit https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/ to read their findings in more detail and follow the outstanding work of the Gobekli Tepe experts.

All images are taken from the below sources and from Google Images for educational purposes only. Please subscribe to Ancient Architects, Like the video and please leave a comment below.

Sources:
Cereal processing at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, southeastern Turkey: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
Wild Hunt website overview: https://wildhunt.org/2021/09/the-worl...
Last Stand of the Hunter-Gatherers: https://www.archaeology.org/issues/42...
Plant Food Processing Tools at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe by Laura Dietrich: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeop...
Tepe Telegrams weblog: https://tepetelegrams.wordpress.com/
Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
Bread and porridge at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe: A new method to recognize products of cereal processing using quantitative functional analyses on grinding stones: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Bread and Porridge at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, Turkey (Video):    • Bread and Porridge at Early Neolithic...  
Changing Medialities - Symbols of Neolithic Corporate Identities: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

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