When “Göbekli Tepe” Neolithic archaeological site on a hilltop near Urfa (Southeast Turkey) was discovered in 1995, no one could have had possibly imagined that it will revolutionise our understanding of the development of human societies. I will briefly summarise the general importance of the find below, and then attempt to formulate its importance to nomadology, that is, the study of nomadic social organization, thought, and culture. This is meant to be a short intro to the subject, which I hope to develop in time.
Göbekli Tepe has come to be known as the world’s “oldest known religious structure”. It is dated about 11000 years before present time or 9000 BCE, predating the mighty Stonehenge by some 6000 years! Mind you the first of the Egyptian Pyramids are dated to 2700 BCE, and the beginning of the human history or “civilisation”, i.e., Sumerian clay tablets to 3300 B.C (note the “civilisation” in double quotes here; I have a lot to say about it in the future posts on nomadology). So whatever the frame of reference one chooses, this is an astonishing achievement for Neolithic hunter-gatherers or “stone-age cavemen”, who are previously thought of capable of nothing of this sort or scale. 9000 BCE marks roughly the beginnings of the Neolithic era, or the New Stone age.
“Before the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists believed that societies in the early Neolithic were organized into small bands of hunter-gatherers and that the first complex religious practices were developed by groups that had already mastered agriculture. Scholars thought that the earliest monumental architecture was possible only after agriculture provided Neolithic people with food surpluses, freeing them from a constant focus on day-to-day survival. A site of unbelievable artistry and intricate detail, Göbekli Tepe has turned this theory on its head.” http://archive.archaeology.org/0811/abstracts/turkey.html
“To Schmidt [the German archaeologist overseeing the excavations] and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilisation. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.
The immensity of the undertaking at Gobekli Tepe reinforces that view. Schmidt says the monuments could not have been built by ragged bands of hunter-gatherers. To carve, erect and bury rings of seven-ton stone pillars would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed. Hence the eventual emergence of settled communities in the area around 10,000 years ago. “This shows sociocultural changes come first, agriculture comes later,” says Stanford University archaeologist Ian Hodder, who excavated Catalhoyuk, a prehistoric settlement 300 miles from Gobekli Tepe. “You can make a good case this area is the real origin of complex Neolithic societies.” http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html?c=y&story=fullstory
Need say more? “First came the temple, then the city” as Schmidt puts it. This turns upside down not only the whole classical sociocultural evolution theory, otherwise known as the theory of unilineal evolution but also most other theories that are born out of the need to overcome the limitations and errors inherent in the unilineal theory, including cultural relativism and multilineal evolution, as well as, the varieties of Marxist archaeology.
First developed by Lewis Morgan the unilineal theory posits the development of all human societies in terms of three basic stages:
“Hunter-gatherer (the “savage” stage), agriculture and metal-work (the stage of “barbarism”), and the highest stage beginning with writing (the stage of ” civilization”).” http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Lewis_H._Morgan
In the cases of simplistic forms of Marxist thought this takes the form of progress from primitive communism through slavery, feudalism and then capitalism.
None of the above theory takes into account the fundamental and inseparable interaction between hunter-gatherer and later-day pastoral nomadism and agriculture based sedentary “civilisations” where writing was extensively employed. Far from being lineal or linear, let alone unilineal, the relationship between nomadic and sedentary civilizations is one that of co-creation, and in this sense truly dialectical. It’s often the nomads, who bring about the original invention, which is captured, appropriated, and developed by the State machine as discussed in length in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
The case in point is the birth of organised religion. In Part 2, I will expound on this idea and more generally nomadic-sedentary dialectical co-creation.
murat karamuftuoglu 