Something About Göbekli Tepe’s Skull Cult No Longer Makes Sense

In twenty seventeen, three carved skulls from Göbekli Tepe made headlines everywhere. Grooves cut into bone, a hole drilled cleanly through one cranial vault, and the phrase skull cult attached itself to the site permanently. The paper itself was careful and peer reviewed and said exactly what its evidence allowed. The label that escaped it did not. In this one I go through what the ground has produced since, because it does not support the headline. Around seven hundred human bone fragments now, overwhelmingly skull, with no complete burial anywhere on the site, and roughly ten percent of those fragments carrying simple defleshing cut marks. Three specimens with unique modifications is an exceptional find. Ten percent is not exceptional, it is a rate, which points at routine mortuary processing rather than a defined ritual performed on chosen individuals. Then the detail that makes the ancestor veneration reading genuinely hard to hold. The T-shaped pillars are stone people, that much is not disputed, with carved arms and clasped hands and belts and loincloths. And they were deliberately carved without faces from the start, by sculptors who could clearly render a fox or a vulture beautifully. Jericho did the opposite, rebuilding faces in plaster over bare skulls with shells for eyes. And thirty five kilometres away at Karahan Tepe, the same tradition gives its figures full realistic faces, including a T-pillar found in October twenty twenty five with deep set eyes and a prominent nose.
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