Ritual performance and religion in early Neolithic societies
South-west Asia in the last 10 millennia of the Palaeolithic (known regionally as the Epi-palaeolithic) and the early (aceramic) Neolithic saw the emergence of a completely new kind of human social organisation in the form of large, permanently co-resident communities of hundreds, and in some cases of thousands, of people. Monumental architecture, vividly dramatic sculptures, and other sorts of symbolic representation and ritualised performance accompanied that great transformation of society. Having sketched the outline of the social and economic transformation, I will discuss the role of symbolic culture in the formation and maintenance of these earliest sedentary communities. And that will allow us to consider how ritual performance developed in the service of collective memory, collective identity, and the making of ideas about the nature of the world, its superhuman agencies, and the community’s place in that world.
The great transformation and its background
Over the Epi-palaeolithic period, covering the 10 millennia of the final Pleistocene (c. 22–12,000 years ago), hunter-gatherer groups developed a fundamentally new way of life. Since Flannery (1969) focused attention on what he termed the broad spectrum revolution, researchers have concentrated on the innovations in subsistence strategies; people invested much time, effort and skill in hunting and trapping reptiles, small mammals, birds, fish and amphibians, and they harvested, stored and processed the nutritious seeds of grasses, cereals, and pulses. Alongside these adaptations to subsistence strategy, they lived in larger groups than before, and became less mobile, adopting transhumant, semi-sedentary settlement patterns. Before the beginning of the Neolithic period, some of these hunter-harvester communities were effectively sedentary, and were living permanently together in numbers that were 5–10 times larger than ever before. From at least the beginning of the Neolithic, some of these communities were cultivating selected crops of wheat, barley, lentils and other pulses.
Over many years the broad spectrum revolution scenario outlined by Flannery has been debated, concentrating on the issue of how and why the farming of crops and the herding of animals resulted. Both Flannery and Binford (Binford 1968) argued that farming and herding were the inevitable consequence of increasing population density, itself the consequence of the adoption of sedentary settlement, which was in turn the necessary corollary of an economy based on storage of the harvests of cereals and pulses. More recently, the population pressure scenario has been superseded by an alternative scenario that simply reverses the variables in the population-environmental resources equation: the standard account of the period has exchanged rising population levels with declining wild food resources, blaming the cooler, drier Younger Dryas phase in the last millennium of the Pleistocene (the final Epi-palaeolithic) period.
In common with Mary Stiner (2001) and Melinda Zeder (2012), I do not accept the whole of that story; Zeder in particular has systematically dismantled the current broad spectrum revolution scenario that presents is as a process driven by the inferred regional environmental impact of a global climatic oscillation. In company with Stiner, Zeder and others (Davis 1983; 2005; Davis et al. 1994; Stiner and Munro 2002; Stiner et al. 1999; 2000), I set the processes that have been observed in the Epi-palaeolithic and early aceramic Neolithic in the longer-term story of the rapid expansion of Homo sapiens populations, who in a remarkably short time colonised Eurasia and Australasia. Within south-west Asia from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic there is evidence for human population density at levels that steadily depleted the species preferred by hunters. There is emerging evidence that Homo sapiens in the Upper Palaeolithic period in western Europe, too, lived at densities ten times those of their Neanderthal predecessors (Mellars and French 2011). In addition to living at higher overall population densities, the evidence from the Levant is that the size of population units – the number of people living together – was steadily growing throughout the Epi-palaeolithic period, in parallel with the trend to transhumance and sedentism already mentioned. And that demographic process accelerated even more in the early Neolithic period (Kuijt 2000b), fed by more and more intensive agriculture, shortly followed by the herding of domesticated sheep, goat, pigs and cattle; settlements grew in number and in size, and the density of domestic buildings within settlements increased.
We can make sense of the relentless and exponential population growth, and particularly the growth in size and permanence of co-resident groups, by setting it in the context of the long-term evolutionary history of the hominins among the primates. The trajectory of hominin cognitive and social evolution is defined by Robin Dunbar and his collaborators in terms of the social brain hypothesis (Aiello and Dunbar 1993; Dunbar 1997; 1998; 2004; Dunbar et al. 2010). What we see in the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic of southwest Asia is the continuation and amplification of a trend that is observable in the history of the species Homo sapiens; and Homo sapiens is simply the latest, smartest and fastest evolving species within the genus Homo over the last two or three million years. In common with other primates hominins have evolved brains than are larger than physically required by their bodies. Hominin brains and minds deploy cognitive and social skills that enable them to live in larger and more cohesive and cooperative social groups.
Dunbar and his colleagues have been able to chart the strong correlation between the expanding cortex of the hominin brain and increasing social group size. The social brain hypothesis proposes that the growth of the folded outer part of the hominin brain has allowed the expansion of the size of social group that the individual can cope with, keeping check on the social relations between individuals, and allowing the assessment of who can be trusted, and how others may be manipulated. However, the graph of the correlation between social group size and the ratio of the cortex to the whole brain indicates that Homo sapiens has the capacity to manage life in a group of up to 150 people (now often referred to as Dunbar’s number). Gamble has estimated that Homo sapiens societies of the European Upper Palaeolithic consisted of several mobile hunter-gatherer bands, numbering in total perhaps 125 people; for the first time, he argued, such networks of hunter-gatherer bands could maintain social relations by means of symbolic exchange of high-quality raw materials and things like marine shells, that could be pierced and worn (Gamble 1999, chap. 8). He called this new ability to create a community among people who saw each other only very occasionally ‘the release from proximity’ (Gamble 1998).
The changing nature of community
In the Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic of south-west Asia we see this Upper Palaeolithic extension of social networking undergo categorical change. As a first step in describing the nature of the transformation, ‘the release from proximity’ of the Upper Palaeolithic became the bonds of permanent proximity. The numbers of people who rarely saw one another and were known to one another only through the medium of their social exchange of goods and materials became instead the people who were generally not relatives or close friends, but with whom the settlement was shared, who necessarily cooperated and trusted one another, despite their lack of close personal knowledge. Since this transformation in the scale and nature of social life was not accompanied by any appreciable genetically-controlled evolution of the human brain – it happened far too quickly for biological evolution – it follows that cultural means were essential to allow people to sustain large, permanently coresident communities. We can assume that the individual living in one of the new, large, permanent communities would know personally only some of his or her fellow-residents (around 150, according to Dunbar’s research), but it was essential that he or she was able to recognise that others were members of the same community, and could be trusted to behave in accordance with common norms; and by the same token it was essential that the individual was also able to signal their community membership and trustworthiness to others.
The anthropologist Anthony Cohen has written powerfully about the nature of community and how it functions in the minds of its members by means of symbols; he writes that ‘the consciousness of community has to be kept alive through manipulation of its symbols’ (Cohen 1985, 15). Psychologists and others emphasise the importance of memory and sense of identity, both for the individual and the community. And the idea of performance is often found embedded, for example, in the continual manipulation of symbols within a community, or in the way that ‘the individual plays an active role in performing society and its structures into existence’ (Gamble 1999, 33), or in the way that ceremonies and rituals are repeatedly performed in the service of sustaining collective memory and identity.
The key to understanding the nature of collective memory and shared sense of identity is the recognition that collective memory is cultural memory (a term much used by Assmann 1995) that is distributed among individuals, and individual memory consists of acts of remembering; recalling the past takes place in the present, where imagining the future takes place. If the individual’s memory and sense of identity is built on acts of remembering, it follows also that the shared, or collective, memory and sense of identity of a community is built on shared acts of remembering. Assmann makes it clear that collective memory must be a cultural phenomenon: cultural memory ‘preserves the store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity’, defining who ‘we’ are, and how ‘they’ are different. He discusses how the communicated meaning and shared knowledge is objectified and stabilised in spoken words, ritual actions or in visual (i.e. material) form (Assmann 1995, 130–132).
Another important point concerning our auto-biographical memory and sense of self is that it is founded in episodic memory, not semantic memory, which is a ‘what-where-when’ kind of factual memory, the kind of facts that we learn at school as ‘history’. Episodic memory starts from re-experiencing episodes in the form of images. These episodic images are affective; that is, they stir our feelings and emotions. Pascal Boyer remarks that recalling events in one’s personal history, thinking about future events, and thinking about imaginary events or beings involves imagination (Boyer 2009, 3), a capacity that the psychologists Suddendorf and Corballis describe as a capacity for ‘mental time travel’ (Suddendorf and Corballis 1997; 2007). At a relatively simple level, the capacity to insert experiences from the past into present consciousness, where they can be reviewed and re-evaluated is a form of recursion (Corballis 2011, 83). If the individual’s sense of self depends upon autobiographical memory, it follows that shared and collective memory, distributed among the individuals who form the collective, is essential to community identity. And it similarly follows that the collective memory of the community is based on the foundation of shared acts of remembering that are imagistic and affecting.
Connerton, a leading authority on collective memory, particularly emphasises the central role of ‘commemorative ceremonies’ and ‘bodily acts’ (Connerton 1989). Thus the values of the community are shared and transmitted in collective actions, ceremonies and rituals, whether religious or not, assuring the collective identity through collective remembering. Like Whitehouse (2004), and Lawson and McCauley (Lawson and McCauley 1990; McCauley and Lawson 2002) with regard to religious rituals, however, Connerton pays little or no attention to the point that very often there is a proper and special place where ceremonies or rituals should take place. I used to think that the monumental buildings and the sculptures were the settings specially designed and equipped for the rituals that took place within them; I wrote of them as ‘theatres of memory’ (Watkins 2004a), but now I am not so sure.
The material construction of community
I prefer to link these material constructions and instruments to Merlin Donald’s idea of systems of external symbolic storage (Donald 1991; 1993; 1998). Following the emergence of fully modern language, which constitutes the second of Donald’s three stages in the evolution of human cognition and culture, the emergence of systems of external symbolic storage culminated in the development of efficient, phonetic writing systems. Responding to Donald’s concept of systems of external symbolic storage, Renfrew (1998) argued that, prior to the development of written language, there should be an earlier stage when material culture systems fulfilled a nontextual function as external symbolic storage systems. I agree strongly with Renfrew, and have argued that the monumental architecture, sculptures and other, smaller visual representations of the early aceramic Neolithic constituted the material correlates of ideas about the nature of those communities, their lives and their worlds (Watkins 2004a; 2004b; 2006; 2009; 2010). Here, I wish to go further and suggest that the construction of these monuments, the making and placing of the sculptures, and the repeated remaking, refurbishing, and finally the concealing of buildings and the deliberate defacing of sculptures were forms of ritual performance.
Ritual performance, memory and identity are closely related, as was discussed above. At the surface level, rituals consist of a set of actions, or prescribed words, and often associated instruments; but at another level those actions constitute a meaning of another kind. It is not uncommon that washing with water, for example, is the outward and visible sign for ritual purification. The cognitive psychologist Edwin Hutchins would say that the font and the water used in a Christian baptism are ‘material anchors’ for a ‘conceptual blend’, supporting the transmission of the metaphysical ideas (Hutchins 2005). Ritual performances are repeated, making them in some sense acts of memory. Rituals consist not only of words and actions, but also of appropriate instruments, or they take place in an appropriate context or place. Ritual performances that involve what Whitehouse describes as ‘sensory pageantry’ bind together those who have shared the experience. While people can tell stories, and re-tell myths, shared ideas, beliefs and values require material forms. What we see in the early Neolithic settlements is evidence of the assurance of community in the form of shared ritual performance, at different levels, at the level of the household, or a larger group within the settlement, or the whole community.
Even the solid and durable material forms of architecture require that the community or their representatives continue to enact symbolising actions in order to sustain the abstract notion of collective identity that they represent. From my own experience in the excavation of structures at the very early Neolithic settlement of Qermez Dere in north Iraq, it is possible to describe the repeated making, re-making, modifying, maintaining, and finally the burying of the house as ritualised performances that repeatedly made real the idea of the house-as-home (Watkins 1990; Watkins et al. 1995). More recently, there has been a series of unexpected discoveries at sites in north Syria and southeast Turkey.
Although the several special-purpose buildings adjacent to the open area at the centre of the settlement of Çayönü, in southeast Turkey, north-west of Diyarbakır, were found in the late 1960s, we learned something about them in detail only much more recently. In addition to two parallel lines of standing stones in the central “plaza”, four special-purpose buildings were constructed at different times during the long lifetime of the settlement (Özdoğan 1999; Özdoğan and Özdoğan 1990; 1998; see also Verhoeven 2002). The best documented, the skull-building, itself had a long history, being remodelled or rebuilt two or three times and repeatedly used (Croucher 2003). The so-called flagstone building at Çayönü, built with its floor below ground level, and its pair of monoliths set upright in its floor, resembles the almost square, subterranean structure in the settlement at Nevalı Çori, in the Euphrates valley in southeast Turkey (Hauptmann 1993; 1999). The houses at Nevalı Çori were very similar in size, plan and monumentality to those of Çayönü, and the special-purpose building at Nevalı Çori, like the flagstone building at Çayönü, was different in almost every way from the stereotyped plans of the houses. Three of the features that are common to the special-purpose buildings is that they were quite different architectural designs from the normal houses, that they were carefully maintained, modified, and even rebuilt, and that, at the end of their lives, they were dismantled and obliterated. The special-purpose building at Nevalı Çori was rebuilt on exactly the same site at least once, and probably twice. It was almost square in plan, its terrazzo floor reached by means of stone steps. Around the base of the walls, there was a low bench made of stone. At intervals around the bench, other monoliths had been set, but they had all been deliberately broken where they protruded from the bench. In the centre of the chamber a pair of tall stone monoliths had stood, although one of them was completely missing when the excavators discovered the building. The surviving monolith was broken, but the top part lay within the building. It was a tall T-shaped slab, with human arms carved on its flat sides, and hands whose finger-tips met below the ‘stomach’ of the figure.
The Çayönü buildings and the special-purpose building at Nevalı Çori can be dated to the later aceramic Neolithic period. In the Euphrates valley in the far north of Syria salvage excavations have uncovered three settlements that date to the early aceramic Neolithic; each of these communities built special-purpose, communal buildings. At Jerf el Ahmar, the buildings of the settlement cluster around an open area, in the middle of which there was a large, circular, subterranean structure. This was the first of a series of three such circular, subterranean buildings in a settlement that was occupied for more than a thousand years (Stordeur et al. 2000). It was less well preserved than the second and third buildings, but was generally like the second building in internal form. Over the centuries the centre of gravity of the settlement drifted, and the second circular, subterranean building was constructed in a cavity that was about seven metres in diameter and three metres deep. It was rebuilt at least once. Like its predecessor, it contained several large, doorless cells. It has been shown that they had been used for communal grain and lentil storage (Willcox and Stordeur 2012), but the building also seems to have had a ceremonial function. At the end of its life, the posts supporting the roof were removed, the roof was collapsed and set on fire. But before that, the decapitated body of a young female was placed in the centre of the floor. Finally the whole space was filled with more than 100 m3 of soil. The excavation of the cavity for the building, its construction, its rebuilding, and its final destruction and obliteration were certainly major public works that would have involved many of the settlement’s inhabitants. But one can also imagine that these were labours that were accompanied by considerable ceremony; and the building must have embodied significant meaning for the community.
The third communal building at Jerf el Ahmar was of a similar size, but of quite different internal plan. It was an open circle, with a low bench around the base of the wall. At the front of the bench was a circle of six large wooden posts that supported the roof; and between the posts large stone slabs, carved with a chevron pattern in relief, fronted the bench. Again, like its predecessors, this subterranean building was finally dismantled and obliterated. The contemporary settlements of Dja’de and Tell ‘Abr 3, each about 20 or so kilometres from one another in the Euphrates valley upstream from Jerf el Ahmar, also had circular, subterranean communal buildings, each with its own distinctive features. The circular, subterranean structure at Dja’de is not yet fully excavated (Coqueugniot 2014, 97 and 99); it had three stub walls attached to the peripheral wall, their mud plaster surfaces covered with a white base colour on which complex rectilinear patterns were painted in red and black paint. Three subterranean, circular structures were found at Tell ‘Abr 3, though their stratigraphic relationship to one another has not been made clear in the preliminary notices (Yartah 2004; 2005). Two of them were very similar to the latest of the three at Jerf el Ahmar, and they shared the characteristics of their destruction, burning, and obliteration with the Jerf el Ahmar communal buildings. One of the buildings had a number of stone slabs with incised animals and motifs; and there were animal bone deposits concealed within the bench.
Another kind of ritual practice that was common to all the settled communities of the early Neolithic was the burying of bodies within the settlement, or, as at Çatalhöyük, within the house itself. In no settlement are there enough burials to account for the population, and we should not think of the ritual of these burials as the normal ritual disposal of the dead. Rather, using again Hutchins’ (2005) metaphor of the anchor, the dead body can be considered as the material anchor that was instrumental in setting and holding the ritual performance in the shared memory of those who took part in, or attended upon, the burial. Especially in the Levant, it became common practice to return to a burial to retrieve the skull. Skulls were curated; sometimes, facial features were modelled onto them; and groups of curated skulls have been found buried in or near houses in caches. Ian Kuijt has written of the cycles of ritual, first involving the burial of the body, then the retrieval and curation of skulls, and a third involving the burial of caches of skulls (Kuijt 2000a; 2001). And Kuijt points out that, while the burial of the corpse in or beside a house may have involved a small circle of people, the collecting, handling, and finally the caching of groups of retrieved skulls is likely to have involved a number of occasions, and a wider group within the community. Although we cannot be clear about why certain bodies received these special treatments, we can see how collective memory was instituted, shared, reframed and shared again.
For some years after the first retrieved skulls with modelled features were found in the PPN-B strata at Jericho, more examples of single intramural burials in an oval pit, skull retrieval, and occasionally skulls with modelled features, were found at other settlements in the southern Levant. As excavations have taken place in the central and northern Levant in more recent years, it has become clear that there is no uniformity in the way that the practices were carried out. Rather, each community seems to have worked out its own interpretation of the general rules. The anthropologist Richard Wilk has coined the term ‘common difference’ for this phenomenon, where some general principles are shared ‘globally’ but are articulated in local communities appropriately to the local context (Wilk 1995; 2004). For example, at Tell Aswad in southern Syria in the later aceramic Neolithic period, at first bodies were placed on the floor of a house, perhaps against the wall, or even partly within a niche in the wall, or perhaps against the outer face of the wall (Stordeur and Khawam 2009). The bodies were covered by a small mound of soil with a plastered surface. Then, at a certain point in time, there was a change in the rules: two mortuary areas were defined by broad, shallow pits at the edge of the built-up area of the settlement. Clutches of modelled skulls were deposited at the edge of each new mortuary pit as a sort of foundation deposit. So the last act in the cycle of skull retrieval, curation and reburial instituted a new cycle of burials. Following the deposition of the clutches of skulls, burials followed in some numbers; some bodies were primary burials, others appeared to be secondary, males and females, children, adolescents and adults are represented.
The shared practice of intramural burial and skull retrieval is one complex element in an extraordinary phenomenon of extensive local, regional and supra-regional networks of sharing and exchange (Watkins 2008). We have known of extended networks of exchange for a long time. We know the extent of the exchange networks that carried central Anatolian obsidian as far as southern Jordan, and east Anatolian obsidian as far west as Çatalhöyük, and southeast to southwest Iran. Now we can add some other materials that were exchanged as symbolic elements in these supra-regional networks through which goods, materials, ideas, techniques and symbolic representations travelled and were shared.
What modern humans have learned to do is to create external media that effectively extend the mind, and through that network of extended minds they extend the network of people constituting the community. That capacity to form extended networks first emerged among archaic modern humans in southern Africa. But it was taken a huge step further in the later Epi-palaeolithic and early Neolithic periods in south-west Asia. Extended minds, using symbols, icons, shared ideas about the value of things, were able to construct, and through exchange, maintain communities of many hundreds, even of several thousand people, and sub-continental scale networks of communities – a community of a different kind, at a larger, wider scale, in which people engaged with people that they did not know and had never met.
Göbekli Tepe, in south-east Turkey, is a candidate for being a ‘central place’ in such an extended regional network, where many people from a number of communities in the region shared in the building of massive and extraordinary structures and making and erecting sculptures (Schmidt 2006; 2010; 2011; 2012). The circular subterranean enclosures, the extraordinary T-shaped monoliths that were set within the structures, and much of the symbolism carved on the stones are not unique to Göbekli Tepe; elements and aspects have been found at contemporary settlement sites around the region.
Ritual practices and religious concepts
So far I have not mentioned religion and ideas of the supernatural. The rituals and ceremonies that we have encountered were concerned with buildings and the memorialising of collective memory and community identity. There were ritualised practices that involved the burial of bodies, and the retrieval and curation of skulls, but it is unclear whether they involved beliefs in an afterlife. With Göbekli Tepe and sites with similar T-shaped monoliths, the situation changes, however. Pascal Boyer among others has noted that religious ideas of supernatural agents seems to be practically universal among contemporary human societies (Boyer 1994; 2001). Boyer shows how the idea of supernatural agents is at once comprehensible because in many ways they are just like us, and at the same time they are memorable because they possess extraordinary, supernatural qualities (such as immortality, omniscience, invisibility). Shared religious ideas about supernatural agency and systems of religious belief and practice can be argued to be a very recent cognitive ability of Homo sapiens; Dunbar shows how shared religious beliefs require minds that are capable of at least four levels of intentionality (the technical term for advanced theory of mind), a facility that only modern human sapiens have (Dunbar 2004). At some stage in human cognitive and cultural evolution, ideas of supernatural agents will have begun to emerge. In his last book, Jacques Cauvin (1994; 2000) argued that a revolutionary psycho-cultural facility with symbolism emerged at the beginning of the Neolithic, enabling people for the first time to begin imagining supernatural agents. It is now possible to bring together cognitive psychological evidence that supports his belief that this capacity indeed appeared around that time, 12,000 years ago. Belief systems in which superhuman agents can know what we are thinking, and before whom we can be ashamed of our failures and wrong-doings, are clearly very good for reinforcing norms of good behaviour within society, and Atran and Henrich, for example, can reason persuasively that shared religious belief systems become both possible and useful as large-scale human societies emerge (Atran and Henrich 2010; Henrich 2009).
The T-shaped monoliths at Göbekli Tepe and other sites in the region were highly schematised anthropomorphs, as the arms, hands, fingers, and the wearing of items of clothing and symbolic items show. Yet their highly schematised heads completely lack facial features, especially the eyes. The importance of the face, and particularly the eyes, is a well-established observation in psychology; the face and the eyes are a critically important focus of human attention. Developmental psychologists have shown that human infants in the early months of life not only recognise the mother’s voice, but also recognise the mother’s face, and in particular the eyes. Thus, if these sculptures are deliberately anthropomorphic, they are equally deliberately inscrutable. As material anchors for a conceptual blend (Hutchins 2005), the monoliths fulfil the characteristics of supernatural agents that Boyer identifies, a combination of counterintuitive components that catch the imagination with plausibly human psychological features that make them agents with intentions that we can imagine.
Discussion
While there may be evidence of ritual practices and ceremonies (and I have omitted consideration of feasting), I have been careful not to make an automatic link between ritual practices and religious belief. In fact, I am sure that many of the repeated rituals and occasional ceremonies had little or nothing to do with service to any supernatural agents, as is the case in our own lives today. There are examples of the representation of un-natural phenomena, but that is not the same as saying that they are supernatural phenomena. For example, there are schematically represented snakes at a number of early aceramic Neolithic sites in the north Levant, but there is at least one representation of a two-headed snake on a small chlorite plaque from Tell Qaramel (shown by Prof. Mazurowski in a lecture). A second kind of unnatural representation is the combination of a large raptor, possibly a vulture, standing on or grasping a human head with its talons, of which there are two examples from Nevalı Çori. The complex sculpture found at Göbekli Tepe, and now in the Urfa Museum, which Schmidt has nicknamed the ‘totem-pole’, is another example. Since the faces of the humans and animals on the front of this pillar-like stone were deliberately defaced before it was enclosed within a wall, it is difficult to decipher, but it seems that the large head at the top of the pillar is that of an animal with ears like a bear, and rather small eyes on the top of its head. In its arms (if it is a human–animal hybrid) or its forelegs (if it is a bear), it grasps the head of a human figure, which in turn grasps another further down the pillar. However the upper figure is interpreted, whether bear or human–animal hybrid, what is depicted is not a natural scenario. Non-natural representations involve imagination and may be associated with myths, but that is different from the formation of ideas about super-natural agents that in some sense share human characteristics.
If concepts of supernatural agents are as Boyer has characterised them, a combination of recognisably human-style agency with a counterintuitive component that distinguishes them as supernatural and makes them memorable, the only candidates are the inscrutable anthropomorphic monoliths of Göbekli Tepe (including the smaller, later aceramic Neolithic examples from that site), and the similar monoliths from Nevalı Çori, which also date to the later aceramic Neolithic. These schematised anthropomorphic monoliths also illustrate what Hutchins (2005) has described as ‘material anchors for conceptual blends’. That these representations occur only at Göbekli Tepe in the early aceramic Neolithic period, when the site may have served as a culturally symbolic ‘central place’ for the population across a wide region, is particularly interesting in the context of the proposal by Atran and Henrich that gods may become important in binding together groups of people in prosociality as those groups become larger, more extensive and more complex (Atran and Henrich 2010).
There is evidence of the practice of rituals, as we have seen, for example, in the careful practices concerned with the maintenance of houses, and in the treatments of selected bodies and their skulls. But there is no evidence for rituals that could be defined as religious in purpose. In his discussion of the archaeology of religious ritual, Renfrew has argued that we should be able to discern the spaces that were designed for the performance of ritual, even though there may be no surviving trace of figures of the gods or any of the apparatus with which rituals may have been performed (Renfrew 2007). In the circular, subterranean communal buildings set in the centre of settlements of early aceramic Neolithic date in the Euphrates valley of north Syria, there was limited space where ritual performance might have been staged, but there is no evidence of any kind that would indicate what kind of rituals there were, no furniture or instruments that might be associated with ritual performance, and no representations of supernatural agents before whom rituals might be enacted.
In the monumental circular enclosures of early aceramic Neolithic date at Göbekli Tepe, there were pairs of anthropomorphic monoliths that can be argued to be representations of supernatural beings (as there was a pair of anthropomorphic monoliths in the centre of the subterranean rectangular chamber of later aceramic Neolithic date at Nevalı Çori), but the pairs of monoliths, set in their broad pedestals, effectively occupy their space. If the enclosures were designed to accommodate rituals to be enacted before the figures of the deities, one would expect the monoliths to stand with their ‘backs’ to the wall, overlooking an area where the rituals were carried out. The ritualised treatment of houses, as seen at Qermez Dere in north Iraq, at Çayönü in south-east Turkey, or Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia, suggest that the rituals can be seen as more than symbolic actions that signified the special status of the buildings; rather, they can be better understood as actions that made the special status of the buildings. In the same way, I suggest that the creation of the Göbekli Tepe monoliths and their erection in their formal places within the enclosures should be understood as the ritual making of the gods. In this way, the rituals were literally make-believe, the actions that were the making of beliefs about the supernatural beings. Religious practice, in fact, was the creating of religious belief.
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