Hunters and gatherers, not farmers
At the time the great enclosures were raised, there were no domesticated plants or animals here. The animal bones from Göbekli Tepe are wild: gazelle above all, along with wild cattle (aurochs), wild ass, wild boar, wild sheep and goat, and many birds. The plant remains are wild too — including wild cereals, pistachio, and almond. These were skilled foragers living off a rich landscape.
That single fact is what makes the site so important: monumental building came before farming, not after.
Feeding the builders
Raising multi-ton pillars takes many hands, and many hands need feeding. Göbekli Tepe has produced enormous quantities of animal bone and large numbers of grinding stones and stone vessels — the equipment of processing food at scale. Dietrich and colleagues (2012) argued that big communal feasts were central to what happened here: gathering people to build and to eat may have been the whole point. They even raised the possibility of large-scale cereal processing and fermentation — an early step toward brewing — though that remains debated.
The logic is powerful: to feed recurring gatherings on this scale, communities may have been pushed to manage wild cereals ever more intensively — nudging them, over generations, toward cultivation.
The road to farming
This region is central to the origins of agriculture. The wild ancestor of einkorn wheat grows on the slopes of nearby Karacadağ, and genetic studies have linked domesticated einkorn to this very area. Taş Tepeler sits at the hinge: hunter-gatherers gathering, processing, and feasting on wild cereals in the same centuries and the same landscape where those cereals were first domesticated.
So the monuments and the first farms are not two separate stories. They are one — and the appetite of the gathering places may have helped set the table for the Neolithic revolution.
Common questions
What did the people of Göbekli Tepe eat?
Wild foods: gazelle, aurochs, wild ass, boar, wild sheep and goat, birds, plus wild cereals, pistachio and almond. They were hunter-gatherers, not farmers.
Did they farm at Göbekli Tepe?
Not when the monuments were built — there were no domesticated plants or animals then. But the region is where einkorn wheat was first domesticated, and intensive use of wild cereals may have helped lead there.
Was there feasting at Göbekli Tepe?
Very likely. Huge quantities of animal bone and food-processing equipment point to large communal feasts, argued to be central to why people gathered (Dietrich et al. 2012).
Sources & further reading
- Dietrich, O., Heun, M., Notroff, J., Schmidt, K. & Zarnkow, M. (2012). The role of cult and feasting in the emergence of Neolithic communities. New evidence from Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey. Antiquity 86(333): 674–695.
- Peters, J. & Schmidt, K. (2004). Animals in the symbolic world of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, south-eastern Turkey: a preliminary assessment. Anthropozoologica 39(1): 179–218.
- Schmidt, K. (2012). Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: ex oriente. The foundational monograph by the site's first excavator.
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →