Schmidt (55) has been digging there for 15 years, and expects to stay the rest of his life, yet he understood the full significance of the site in the first 60 seconds of his first visit.
The site is such an outlier that an American archeologist who stumbled on it in the 1960s simply walked away, unable to interpret what he saw. On a hunch, Schmidt followed the American's notes to the hilltop 15 years ago, a day he still recalls with a huge grin. He saw carved flint everywhere, and recognized a Neolithic quarry on an adjacent hill, with unfinished slabs of limestone hinting at some monument buried nearby. "In one minute—in one second—it was clear," the bearded, sun-browned archeologist recalls. He too considered walking away, he says, knowing that if he stayed, he would have to spend the rest of his life digging on the hill.
The human mind is even more complex than its past.
8 comments:
Just because the buildings are classy and there are nice statues, doesn't mean it's a temple. Those classy pillars at Petra fronted a whorehouse. The Marija Gimbutas stuff: 'people had statues of naked women, this proves
they worshipped the Mother Goddess'? Past its prime.
Missionaries did a lot of the early ethnic study, and they were genuinely religious. Then they academics took over and made it all silly.
Of course the place could have been a temple. So could the Temple of Venus at Petra. And any given stone-age statue of a fat chick, worn smooth as if by long fondling in the sweaty hand of a horny, lonely hunter, could have been a genuine expression of pagan piety. We don't know.
Bruce
Bruce
the claim that we don't know - period - doesn't seem very plausible to me, especially if you base it on such a huge span of time - for Petra or other venus temples of the times there surely must be something in writing telling us how they were viewed at the time so to equal them to stone age stuff doesn't convince me.
And as to this Gobekli place:
on a foggy autumn day I have been wandering through the dolmen studded field at Carnac - whether we call it religion or something else I don't care but it felt eerily similar to wandering through a damp old out of use church ...
Silke
Silke-
Ever wander through an abandoned mall? Or an abandoned power house?
Bruce
Bruce
good point
- but I still believe that giving Gestalt to the unknown and thus creating a higher authority was a necessity societies had to come up with once they needed to create bonds beyond family or clan or maybe even on that level - the supreme something of the patriarch after all is a myth as every woman can testify to.
Somewhere I have read that the accounting of granaries' contents in old Egypt was done by priests - so maybe ascribing to bureaucrats unassailable adding and substracting abilities and more than normal honesty was one of the more pragmatic reasons why religion had to be.
Silke
Bruce
human nature being what it is here's a question:
- how much funding for further works do you think could this Schmidt hope to find, if he postulated that -let's say - it was a meat drying facility taking care of the surplus from the twice yearly Gazelle wanderings?
(and I for one am so curious a person that I want him and all the other diggers to find ample funding)
Come to think of it he could come up with a narrative that the ancients built all that stuff to protect these same gazelle hordes from extinction due to excess slaughter - he might find an enthusiastic crowd of sponsors in that corner - if it comes to that choice I vote for religion, at least there we are very familiar with the worst it can do to human minds which makes their nut cases a bit predictable which might come in helpful ...
Silke
Frankly, I find this story to be most likely to be discredited as a hoax due to deliberate misdating of carbon dated evidence or whatever tool he is using to ascribe a date to the site - something like Piltdown Man. I read the Newsweek article from which the Sullivan article is essentially copied and pasted, and couldn't see anything there that indicated some serious evidence for the dateing of the site. Maybe I missed it.
Akus
the story was last year or before last year in German papers - that Schmidt is listed as the genuine boss from the German side - here is the homepage of the German institute last updated in September last year
- The information as to what they did in the dating field is sparse and the description is a bit less hyperbole than the Newsweek thing
- after having read it and having read once a very detailed history of the Parthenon and the Elgin marbles and thus taking into account all the brouhaha about us western imperialists stealing the cultural heritage of all the rest I most certainly would love to read insider reports on all the vanities at play in these multinational endeavours. Especially as I couldn't help noticing that on the site "olympics" is mentioned (all my love and admiration of Homer and the Parthenon aside I wouldn't call what they had a religion but I am not an expert and so only have gut-feelings)
Also remembering newspaper articles about Stonehenge I would prefer them to talk about use for cultish purposes instead of claiming religion in capital letters. But as Robert Louis Gates claimed the other day there is an African religion as elaborate as the so-called religions of the book - only where's the book? and following that the millenia long musings about the meaning of that book.
But as we get to read every now and then disputes that Troy is not at Troy by seemingly eminent voices I would prefer them to go slow on the categories and inform us more about what they find out about the pragmatic how-tos of the place.
Silke
http://www.dainst.org/index.php?id=624bc6a4bb1f14a195450017f0000011&sessionLanguage=en#
Silke-
Stonehenge deciphered:
'Beaker People Kegger! C'mon down, we'll dry another gazelle on the dolmen for you!'
Human nature being what it is, it might get all kinds of increased funding. Giving Gestalt to the unknown has its place, but the priests who built the cathedrals were known to worship St Alba (white silver) and St Rufus (red gold). And their honesty was other than normal for worse as well as for better. Cathedrals went up fast, for about a century, like a strip mall boom.
And to this day malls in Latin countries are just plain *more civilized* than in America.
Bruce
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