The Nature and Significance of Göbekli Tepe

Archeology Final Paper

Topic: The Nature And Significance of Göbekli Tepe.

• How were the structures at this site used, and what can they teach us?

Sources:

Banning, E. B. 2011. So fair a house: Göbekli Tepe and the identification of temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East. Current Anthropology 52(5): 619-660.

• Comments start on pg 641. Use at least two comments.
• When you refer to information from the comments in your paper, use in-text citations that identify the author of the comment as well as the authors of the main article, the year, and the page number(s) where you found the information. For example: “(Hauptmann in Banning 2011: 644).” When you use information from the main article or the reply, you just need a citation that looks like this: “(Banning 2011: 652).” In your bibliography, it will be enough to just have one listing for the whole article. The comments don’t have to have bibliography entries of their own.

Dietrich, O., M. Heun, J. Notroff, K. Schmidt, and M. Zarnkow 2012. The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Gobekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey. Antiquity. 86(333): 674-695.

• Dietrich et al. 2012 is the second required article that you need to use, and it was written by a team that includes Klaus Schmidt, the director of the excavations at Göbekli Tepe. (“Dietrich et al.” means it was written by Dietrich and others.)

Other Info:

• “PPN” is an acronym that is used repeatedly in the readings. It stands for “Pre-Pottery Neolithic,” which is a term used in Turkey and the Near East (Southwestern Asia) to refer to the period when sedentary villages and agricultural lifeways were first being established. “PPN A” and “PPN B” are sub-periods (A before B!).
• The PPNB is further split into “Early,” Middle,” and “Late,” which is why you might see references to “EPPNB,” “MPPNB,” and perhaps “LPPNB.”
• Two other notes: When the authors of these articles use the word cult they’re pretty much just using it as another word for religion or sect. They are not suggesting that anything “evil” is going on. Second, don’t get mixed up when you read or use these similar but distinct words: a domestic building (structure, context) is one where people lived (a house that’s a home), but domestication is the process of creating farm crops and tame animals (domesticated plants and animals). Evidence for domestic structures doesn’t automatically mean that domestication is going on, and vice versa!

Paper Details: