While shooting a documentary at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different historical interpretations of the site. An international group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast the T-shaped pillars as traces of humanity’s mystical past. Representatives of an NGO working with conservative Turkish people in Germany likened the pillars’ posture to movements in Islamic prayer. A retired pharmacist insisted that ancient kings had used the site enclosures for astronomical divination. Even the visitor center offered a strongly mystical welcome. Amid this profusion of viewpoints, the material evidence received remarkably little attention.

This intense engagement invites an ambivalent response: should we welcome the considerable public interest, or question the frameworks through which the site is perceived? Much of Göbeklitepe’s popularity can be traced to German news magazine Der Spiegel’s 2006 cover story, which advanced archaeologist Klaus Schmidt’s description of the site as the “world’s first temple,” alongside speculation linking it to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. Meanwhile, the claims by pseudoscientists linking the site to extraterrestrials—as Swiss author Erich von Däniken and his present-day successors remind us—have always found a substantial audience.

But was Göbeklitepe really a temple? More importantly, does it show that religion was the primary force driving humanity toward settled life? Expecting definitive answers about societies without written records may be impossible, but does that make every interpretation equally valid? How did the “temple” interpretation gain factual authority while those questioning it were left to shoulder the burden of proof?

Through this article, I examine five possible arguments for why Göbeklitepe is considered a religious site, with condensed formulations of ideas that have circulated through archaeological scholarship, popular media, and the site’s public presentation:

1. Its monumental structures stood alone in the middle of nowhere, without a nearby water source or surrounding domestic buildings, and were periodically visited by people traveling up to 200 kilometers; they must therefore have been temples forming a pilgrimage center.

The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.

For decades, excavations at Göbeklitepe concentrated on the large circular structures, guided by the assertion that they lacked domestic context for their existence. Karahantepe and Sayburç, excavated more holistically as settlements, instead revealed large circular structures embedded within inhabited spaces. As research at Göbeklitepe has expanded and previously excavated areas have been reassessed, a similar pattern has emerged: monumental structures were embedded within a broader inhabited settlement.

Dwellings do not, of course, exclude ritual activity. But ritual served many purposes in deep prehistory. They could accompany initiation, birth, death, and burial, communal consumption, dispute resolution, social transitions, and the renewal of collective identity. Ritual is therefore not synonymous with religion, and such activity hardly proves that the space was devoted exclusively to worship.

Nor did the circles simply stand above an empty landscape as monuments designed to impress distant onlookers. They were carved directly into the bedrock below ground level, and the growing evidence that they were roofed would have further limited their external visibility. Their “monumentality” was therefore experienced largely from within, weakening the image of conspicuous landmarks built to dominate the landscape and draw pilgrims from afar.

The surrounding structures have yielded food remains, grinding stones, mortars, pestles, and other traces of everyday life. Although fragmentary and scattered, human remains are consistent with sustained occupation of the site, while water management features indicate the deliberate exploitation of local water resources. In October 2025, georadar, geomagnetic, and lidar surveys conducted across previously unexplored parts of the mound identified numerous structures interpreted as possible dwellings—despite decades of confident claims to the contrary, they had been lying there all along.

In short, even if people traveled considerable distances to Göbeklitepe, they were not approaching a solitary monument rising from an empty landscape. The large circular structures formed part of an inhabited settlement landscape.

2. With their T-shaped pillars, elaborate reliefs, wall niches, and polished terrazzo floors, the large circular structures were architecturally unique and distinct from ordinary domestic buildings. They must therefore have been sacred spaces.

Not necessarily.

​The central circles are certainly impressive in scale—but unique? Not quite. Excavations at Karahantepe, Sayburç, and Göbeklitepe increasingly show that T-shaped pillars and large circular architecture were part of a shared regional vocabulary and not an isolated anomaly.

Smaller T-shaped pillars also appear in structures interpreted as dwellings, where they seem to have served practical architectural purposes, including roof support. In the circular structures, this functional form was enlarged and transformed into a richly symbolic one, particularly through animal imagery. This indicates symbolic meanings and collective functions extending beyond those associated with an individual dwelling; however, these functions cannot be identified as religious on their own.

Although generally less elaborate and lacking the carefully finished floors of the central circles, dwellings share features such as wall niches, stone-building techniques, and spatial arrangements. The difference lies in scale, investment, ornamentation, and social importance, and not in a wholly distinct architectural vocabulary. The argument therefore fails twice: uniqueness would not by itself prove that these structures were temples—and their architecture was not unique in the first place.

3. The large circular structures were deliberately buried at regular intervals and replaced by new ones. Because backfilling required immense effort, it could only be driven by a sacred taboo—a ritual requirement to conceal and protect the holy.

Not necessarily.

Although erosion and other natural processes contributed to the fills— whether they were intentional is debatable—deliberate filling occurred in varied contexts across the region. Crucially, it was not confined to large circular structures: dwellings at Göbeklitepe, Karahantepe, and Sayburç were also backfilled. Beyond Taş Tepeler—a group of Neolithic archaeological sites in Türkiye of which Göbeklitepe is the most famous—filling was accompanied by the renewal of communal and domestic structures at other sites such as Aşıklı Höyük and the later farming and herding settlement of Çatalhöyük, with comparable examples recurring as late as the Bronze Age at Küllüoba. A practice crossing architectural, economic, and chronological boundaries cannot be treated as exclusively religious.

Filling may instead have marked the end of a structure’s active life. While food remains in some deposits may reflect collective acts of closure or renewal—not necessarily the sacred burial of holy architecture. Backfilling may also have removed structures from material circulation and prevented them from becoming inherited spaces, allowing successive generations to establish their own spatial and social order rather than inheriting it from their predecessors.

The large circular structures appear to have remained in use longer than many dwellings, perhaps reflecting their greater communal importance. Repairs, alterations, and size reductions of these structures show that they were maintained and adapted across generations before being decommissioned.

Backfilling may therefore have carried symbolic meaning without proving the existence of a temple or specialized religious institution. The practice demonstrates that these structures mattered socially without revealing their true importance.

4. The prominence of male bodies, phallic imagery, and anthropomorphic T-shaped pillars reveals an emerging patriarchal religion, possibly centered on a male or paternal deity.

Not necessarily.

This interpretation turns a chain of possibilities into a conclusion: that phallic imagery signifies male dominance, male dominance establishes patriarchy, and patriarchy implies a religion centered on a paternal deity. Yet each step requires its own evidence.

As I have argued previously, even the identification of this imagery as straightforwardly male is not as well-established as it appears. Figures routinely classified as male—including the so-called human statues and “totems” from Balıklıgöl, Kilisik, and Karahantepe—combine features that may be seen as female, male, androgynous or hermaphroditic; infant or adult; human or animal. Rather than representing specific categories, these figures repeatedly blur boundaries of sex, age, and species.

The phallic-pillared chamber of Structure AB and Karahantepe’s large human statue—with its apparently circumcised penis—certainly foreground the male body. The first small statue found at Göbeklitepe likewise plainly depicts a circumcised penis, with the same feature also appearing in the Sayburç relief. Yet these markings may signify not only masculinity but also self-wounding, sacrifice, or bodily transformation, possibly within practices of initiation. Female figures have also been found at Karahantepe, even if they remain curiously marginally displayed at museums and are rarely mentioned in popular accounts. Meanwhile, the surviving stone record cannot establish the original balance of representation: female figures made from wood, fiber, or other perishable materials could have disappeared without a trace.

More importantly, symbolic prominence is not the same as social power. The material record does not clearly depart from the relatively egalitarian character attributed to these communities. If coordinating regional hunts and inter-settlement gatherings elevated particular men, their roles may have been temporary, protocol-bound, or status-based—not evidence of permanent patriarchal or religious authority.

And even prominent male symbolism would not, by itself, establish religion. A phallus does represent a father god, any more than a female figurine depicts a mother goddess. Such an inference assumes a distinct religious sphere populated by separate metaphysical deities.

Long before institutional temple economies emerged in Sumerian Mesopotamia, however, symbolic life may have been part of relational cosmologies—often described as animistic or shamanic—in which humans, animals, ancestors, landscapes, and other forces were entwined within an interconnected whole rather than divided into separate realms. Ceremonial representations such as the snake-bodied bust from Structure AB at Karahantepe and the Balıklıgöl statue may be better understood within this relational framework. Their composite imagery evokes an interwoven world more readily than a patriarchal pantheon.

5. Structures of this scale—with pillars up to 5 meters high and weighing 10 to 15 tons—could only have been built through coercion, whether physical or spiritual. Since no institutionalized coercive authority existed yet, only religion could have mobilized such “primitive” people.

Is this assumption correct?

This argument projects a distinctly modern hierarchical assumption onto early societies: that large-scale collective labor must have been commanded through either physical force or religious compulsion. Since organized physical coercion clearly did not yet exist, the argument leaves only religious compulsion. The asymmetry is striking: the absence of material evidence for physical coercion is treated as decisive, while the comparable absence of a clergy, temple economy or institutional religious authority is bypassed by treating the ambiguous evidence examined above—from architecture and backfilling to imagery, scale and collective labor—as religious by default. Since these “primitive” people had supposedly not yet been illuminated by modern rationality, what else but mystical belief could have moved them? Cooperation among non-state communities is thus not recognized as a social capacity in its own right, with these communities rendered intelligible only when coercive authority is used on them.

Voluntary and reciprocal communal labor—known as imece in Türkiye—is hardly exceptional. It remains visible to varying degrees in rural communities across much of the world, wherever modern institutions have left room for it, in practices such as harvesting fields, preparing seasonal provisions, bringing water from distant sources and constructing local infrastructure. Such practices are not recent social inventions, however: large-scale cooperation long predates Göbeklitepe. Paleolithic lifeways—particularly communal hunting and the gathering, processing and distribution of food—required planning, division of labor and the collective management of resources. The large circular structures may therefore embody an expansion of long-established cooperative capacities, not a form of organization invented by Neolithic communities.

The scale of such cooperation was recognized surprisingly early. In 1998, Der Spiegel, drawing on Schmidt’s theory, described kilometer-long V-shaped walls used during the Neolithic to funnel entire herds of gazelle into mega structures, arguing that constructing the traps, conducting hunts, and preserving the meat required hundreds or even thousands of people. Although the article did not connect these structures directly to Göbeklitepe, subsequent fieldwork has documented extensive animal-trapping systems in the region. These “desert kites” apparently exceeded both the labor capacity and consumption needs of any single village: constructing and operating them—and slaughtering, processing, preserving, and distributing their yield—required coordination between settlements. This material basis for supra-local cooperation was already visible in Schmidt’s account but was later overshadowed by the claim that “religion” had mobilized “monumental” labor.

Göbeklitepe points in the same direction: large quantities of gazelle bones indicate intensive and possibly seasonal consumption, while heavy grinding stones and wild-cereal processing installations—possibly used for brewing—suggest collectively organized gathering, processing, and consumption. These communities did not merely happen to assemble; their subsistence depended on working together.

Communities that built and operated together and shared hunting landscapes had practical reasons to construct places where cooperation was possible. The large circular structures may therefore have served as multifunctional gathering spaces: places for assemblies, resource allocation, exchanges, dispute resolution, mating and alliance networks, communal consumption, and rituals. They may have combined functions that were only much later divided among councils, courts, marketplaces, ceremonial spaces, and temples.

Shared beliefs may have bound these communities together and given their cooperation symbolic form—but, to adapt an old Turkish saying, not every bearded man is a sage; likewise, not every ritual is religious, nor every symbolic space a temple. Ritual could accompany exchange, negotiation, and collective consumption as a means of enacting, remembering, and renewing cooperation without constituting a separate religious sphere. These structures served communities whose survival depended on collective labor. To turn that achievement into evidence of priestly command is not an archaeological conclusion but a projection of modern hierarchy onto a potentially far more cooperative past.

Beyond the Temple Story

As we have seen, the available evidence not only fails to confirm the temple interpretation but also increasingly undermines the interpretation’s original premises. The site can no longer plausibly be described as an isolated complex without water or dwellings. Its architecture is not unique, backfilling was not confined to its large circular structures, and neither its imagery nor the labor invested in its construction necessarily establishes a religious institution. The question, then, is why the temple story became—and remains—so dominant. Part of the answer may lie in the intellectual and political climate in which archaeological interpretations gain authority and popular appeal.

It is precisely here that Çatalhöyük offers a useful precedent. Archaeologist and author James Mellaart interpreted seated female figurines as evidence of a “(mother) goddess,” an understanding later amplified through anthropologist Marija Gimbutas’s theories and their adoption within feminist goddess movements. Decades later, archaeologist Ian Hodder described Çatalhöyük as a society with “no boss” or specialized elites, yet characterized its death-related imagery as “religious iconography” and in 2010 edited Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, generating debate about the relationship between archaeological narratives, contemporary interests and project sponsorship. At Göbeklitepe, a comparable transformation unfolded between Der Spiegel’s reports of 1998 and 2006, alongside changing emphasis in Schmidt’s interpretation that culminated in his 2006 book Sie bauten die ersten Tempel: Das rätselhafte Heiligtum der Steinzeitjäger (They Built the First Temples: The Mysterious Sanctuary of the Stone Age Hunters).

Although its title already invoked the Garden of Eden, Der Spiegel’s 1998 report was more firmly grounded in material finds and subsistence. Its subtitle foregrounded doorless buildings, burials, gazelle meat, and the origins of settled life, while the article described the site and its discoveries through materially grounded terms such as “megalithic houses,” “megalithic pillars,” and a “megalithic mound.” The article reported Schmidt’s proposal that people had built windowless stone depots to protect gazelle meat preserved by drying, roasting, and salting. Schmidt imagined larders at the edges and temples at the center. But the causal logic of his model remained unmistakably subsistence-based: mass hunting and stored surplus made settled life possible, after which people experimented with cultivation and herding almost as a hobby. Temples were already present in the interpretation, but religion was not yet the driving force. No intervening discovery established a clergy, temple economy, or institution devoted exclusively to worship.

Yet by 2006, the emphasis had shifted decisively. The temple had moved from the center of a subsistence-based settlement model to becoming the explanation for what led to the settlements. The famous cover story brought this shift in Schmidt’s interpretation fully into public view. Der Spiegel now presented Göbeklitepe through an explicitly biblical framework, staging a rapprochement between scientific authority and biblical revelation. It announced a remarkable debate in which geologists and climate experts, not deterred by the revelatory character of God’s document, believed that paradise had coordinates, that it was a real place, and that the Old Testament contained the signposts leading to it. Archaeological and environmental evidence was used to provide this narrative with a landscape, chronology, and material record—from the rivers and sacred mountain of Eden to Abraham’s connection with Urfa, Türkiye, to the tree of the knowledge and snake to agricultural labor and the emergence of property to violence and patriarchy; they were all linked.

“Megalithic houses” became “mighty snake temples.” Meanwhile, the possibility that Adam really existed and the biblical story of the Fall could have a historical basis became the main crux of the story. The magazine had not discovered Eden between 1998 and 2006; thereafter, it transformed Eden from an evocative framework for looking at the material evidence into the main explanation of that evidence.

This convergence suited a particular historical moment. Rigid modernist and Western-centered histories were losing authority, while neoliberal globalization and postmodern civilizational discourse encouraged the search for new global narratives to replace them. A religious origin story rooted in the “East,” in which scientific authority and biblical memory appeared to confirm one another, offered both a safe intellectual framework and a highly marketable story. It especially found fertile ground in Türkiye, where the political and bureaucratic elite who placed religion before, and above all, other forces in human history were rising within the wider climate of the “Alliance of Civilizations.”

This interpretation wasn’t just confined to religious conservatives. In a 2024 broadcast, even Evrim Ağacı (“Tree of Evolution”)—a popular science platform reaching millions and placing evolutionary biology at the center of its mission—argued that Göbeklitepe could not have been permanently inhabited because, apart from tools for quarrying and shaping stone, no domestic material had supposedly been found; its architecture did not indicate permanent habitation; and agriculture was absent from the region. The roofs of the newly excavated surrounding structures were accordingly recast as seating platforms for spectators—even though the central, semi-subterranean buildings were themselves roofed, leaving no line of sight into the interior. Grinding stones and other traces of domestic activity were discounted, while the absence of agriculture was treated as evidence against settled hunter-gatherer life. This interpretation clings to a linear, progressivist account of human development in which Neolithic communities are presumed incapable of complex organization and are governed instead by primitive impulses, emotions and mystical thought; even contrary material evidence is absorbed into this religious explanation rather than used to challenge it.

Yet there is a broader condition that encompasses and exceeds the postmodernist and neomodernist approaches exemplified above. As I have argued in previous articles, the pan-crisis we are living through has deepened a vacuum of grand narratives: the rational modernist consensus has fractured, while traditional religious accounts have likewise failed to provide adequate answers. Populist spiritualisms and hybrid ideologies that mix science, religion, mysticism and civilizational identity have flourished in that space.

As I witnessed during the documentary shoot, the temple story attracts people from strikingly different backgrounds precisely because it is flexible enough to accommodate mystical, religious, rationalist and civilizational expectations all at once. This may explain the story’s persistence but does not establish its archaeological validity. To consider a more archaeologically grounded interpretation of Taş Tepeler would require us to turn from the narrative needs of the present to the historical realities and everyday lives of the people who built these places.

Seen within that context, what emerged at Taş Tepeler is better understood not as the sudden invention of belief, ritual, symbolic thought, or collective architecture, but as a means of adapting older practices to the changing times. During the Paleolithic, some painted caves already appear to have served as recurring places of gathering and symbolic practice, while mammoth bone structures demonstrate that communities could create substantial spaces long before the Neolithic. Groups also assembled across wide territories to exchange materials and knowledge, sustain social and mating networks, share labor, and renew collective memory. With the climatic changes of the early Holocene and the transition toward settled life, the ecology and limestone geology of the Taş Tepeler region in Upper Mesopotamia made space for these much older practices to secure a permanent and locally distinctive architectural form.

Ritual undoubtedly formed part of life in these spaces. But calling them temples—and treating them as evidence that religion drove the transition to settled life—assumes that religion already existed as a distinct institutional sphere, separate from subsistence, exchange, politics and social memory. Neither a specialized clergy nor a temple economy or institution devoted exclusively to worship has been discovered. Nor did “religion” simply come first: the effort to locate oneself within the universe and give meaning to life evolved with the material and social dimensions of human existence, assuming different forms as life changed—neither preceding nor following them.

The evidence points instead to multifunctional places of assembly embedded within permanent settlement landscapes, serving as the central hubs for everyday socioeconomic cooperation, alliance building, and shared ritual practice. Göbeklitepe’s significance lies not in proving that religion built civilization, but in showing how material cooperation, symbolic life and social memory became embodied in permanent architecture. The large circular structures were not separate from everyday existence; they gave a collective form to the relationships through which these communities sustained life.