As we move from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era, roughly 10,000–3500 bce, we have more archaeological data on which to base theories of ritual in early communities. If cave art exemplifies the achievements of Paleolithic culture, a defining feature of the Neolithic period is the widespread appearance of large-scale building projects. The site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey is one of earliest known examples of megalithic architecture, built some 11,000 years ago, an astonishing seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. The site is located in a remote, mountainous region, some distance from the settlement of Urfa. People did not live at Göbekli Tepe, and it was not a burial site. Rather, people traveled several miles to work on it and visit. The cleanly carved reliefs on the large limestone blocks and pillars (the tallest are eighteen feet high and weigh sixteen tons) include anthropomorphic forms, geometric shapes, and a variety of animals: snakes, scorpions, spiders, gazelles, foxes, ducks, and crocodiles. The pillars are arranged in nested, concentric rings, forming a series of enclosures, interconnected with walls and benches; the size of the enclosures vary, holding anywhere from a few dozen to a hundred people. More than two hundred pillars have been unearthed, and those nearer the center of the structure are larger, more finely hewn, and covered with detailed, carved bas-reliefs.
Klaus Schmidt, one of the lead investigators at the site, refers to Göbekli Tepe as the world’s “first temple” and a “religious
sanctuary.” Many archaeologists to have investigated the site agree that its principal use was as a religious and ritual center, rather than a settlement, and this fact is placing received narratives about the development of Neolithic culture into question. The standard tale of cultural evolution tells of an agriculturally based transition from small-scale, nomadic, hunter-gathering groups to larger, settled communities. With the rise of agriculture and
Ritual
permanent settlements, new forms of social organization are called for, promoting cooperation, establishing the divisions of labor, and maintaining social statuses and hierarchies characteristic of large-scale communal life: Enter religion and ritual. The evidence at Göbekli Tepe complicates this narrative, argues Schmidt, who suggests that the site itself may have been fundamental in the shift to agriculture and the practice of congregating in larger communities. In Schmidt’s interpretation, groups of foragers living in a radius around Göbekli Tepe came together to build a massive temple complex, which in turn stimulated the rise of more permanent, agriculturally based settlements.
The function of these buildings can only be characterized as associated with ritual purposes, and no serious claim for domestic use is tenable. It is clear that Gobekli Tepe was not an early Neolithic settlement with some ritual buildings, but that the whole site served a mainly ritual function. It was a mountain sanctuary. In other words, the building, art, and ritual activity at the site were not instruments to serve social organization—the standard sociological view of ritual’s origins and functions—but rather the outcome of ontological interests and ideas out of which emerged the earliest forms of organized, religion. Schmidt imagines scenes of communal feasting, drumming, singing, dancing, the creation of a symbolic sensibility, and a more complex ontology describing the relation between the material and spiritual worlds. Göbekli Tepe emerges in Schmidt’s interpretation as an early cultic site, a forerunner of temple sites such as those found at Delphi and Olympia, attracting pilgrims from the surrounding catch basin. Interpretation of the evidence at sites such as Göbekli Tepe raises questions about the relation between ritual and place. We bring our own cultural presuppositions to the table in interpreting data from the past, and one of the more common ideas, in both scholarly and popular thought, has been the separation of the
Ritual and the origins of culture sacred and the profane as distinct cultural domains, likely a
uniquely modern idea. Schmidt’s perspective is implicitly premised on Emile Durkheim, who introduced the sacred/ profane dichotomy as a foundation for understanding religious phenomena. One assumption often made of ritual is its separateness from ordinary life, hence the need for a special location. In archaeological theory, the early Neolithic temple or shrine becomes ritual’s home, a place for ritual “to take place,” a phrase coined by Jonathan Z. Smith, who develops the notion that ritual is principally a matter of emplacement.
In Smith’s ritual theory, action becomes ritual by virtue of its location. Here, Smith introduces a dichotomy into his theory: ritual, since not ordinary, takes place in nonordinary locales. For Smith, the temple rites of prehistory and antiquity are exemplary of ritual. Ritual, it is thought, happens when, at symbolically significant times and in special places, a group of congregants gather to perform or enact a formal set of acts. The idea, however, that ritual is to be clearly distinguished from ordinary, domestic behavior, as well as necessarily connected with the supernatural or religious, is very much part of modern, Western rationality. Ronald Grimes has critiqued Smith’s spatialized theory of ritual, offering several objections to Smith’s “reduction of a multidimensional phenomenon [ritual] to a single, key dimension that presumably explains the whole.” Grimes favors a more comprehensive analysis of ritual’s many components, while emphasizing ritual as a special kind of action, rather than the result of special emplacement.
Dualistic kinds of separations—nature/culture, sacred/profane, living/dead—are characteristic of the Western intellectual tradition, and ethnography has taught us that such distinctions are not easily applied to indigenous cultures, where ritual permeates society. In keeping with ethnographic research, archaeologists such as Richard Bradley, in a manner similar to Grimes, suggests that prehistoric European and Near Eastern
Ritual
sites as easily call into question as support distinctions between quotidian (nonritual) and sacred (ritual) activities.
How does one go about identifying an archaeological site as a sacred site (that is, a site for ritual) in the first place? Generally, it has to be separated from domestic use, contains artifacts such as statuary of gods and goddesses (again, special and distinct from everyday objects), and the sites themselves should be unique (ornate, complex, large beyond need, highly aestheticized, in special locations) when compared with dwelling sites. Here, we detect, Bradley points out, scholarship importing dualistic conceptions of ritual from the modern West back to Neolithic period. Bradley masterfully demonstrates how the contemporary experience of an increasingly secular world, where religion and ritual have been marginalized to take place in a special setting, has led archaeologists to overlook the intimate relationships between ritual and daily, domestic life in prehistoric societies.