GOBEKLI TEPE

Our final day in southern Turkey began with a two hour bus ride across the endless Anatolian plains and fields of peppers, squash and cotton.  Our destination was Gobekli Tepe,  an archeological dig that has  rewritten the timeline on the development of civilization. The Neolithic find dates back to 10,000 BC.  The carved stone monuments sit in an open wound at the crest of a mound. A team of German archaeologists, led by Klaus Schmidt, have slowly scraped away the earth to reveal what is thought be a burial and worship site for an early hunter:gatherer civilization.  Huge stone figures carved with human and animal markings rise up from the bedrock.  These monoliths are planted in circular hives, nesting close to one another.   Once erected,  the original builders buried these monuments, perhaps for protection, or as part of some ritual belief.

Lucky for us, Schmidt was on site with his team when we arrived. He personally led our group through the dig.  They have been excavating for more than 18 years. Progress is slow.  The project is expensive.  The excavating is limited to spring and the fall when the weather moderates. The work cannot be completed in one lifetime.

Dressed in loose clothes, head scarves and a film of dust and sweat, the laborers, students and experts at work are nearly indistinguishable from one another.  They chip away at thousands of years of compacted dirt with small hand shovels, and then sift through it to find their clues. This giant jigsaw puzzle of our past comes without a cover picture to guide its re-assembly.  It requires encyclopedic knowledge, endless patience and the mind of a crime scene investigator.

We learned that the now barren land which stretched endlessly out from our hilltop view had once been covered in lush forests and fertile farmlands.  Over thousands of years, man had gnawed it to the bone. For all that time, man has been creating stories, building temples, and  naming gods, struggling to make sense of the cycle of birth and death. The stories and the names of the gods have changed countless times, but we are still we are searching.