Excavations at which Anatolian hilltop site in modern Turkey have revealed monumental carved stone pillars dated to roughly 9600 BCE, built by hunter-gatherers thousands of years before pottery, farming, or the wheel existed in the region?
- Catalhoyuk
- Gobekli Tepe
- Troy
- Nemrut Dagi
Why B? And why not the others?
Correct answer: B. Gobekli Tepe
This hilltop site's T-shaped limestone pillars, some standing over 5 metres tall and weighing up to 10 tonnes, were arranged in circular enclosures and carved with reliefs of foxes, scorpions, and vultures. Radiocarbon dating places its oldest layers roughly six thousand years before Stonehenge or Egypt's Great Pyramid were built, which overturned the long-held assumption that only settled farming societies had the organization needed for large-scale monument building. The Anatolian town sometimes confused with it is genuinely ancient and nearby in Turkey too, but it is a densely packed mudbrick farming settlement from around 7100 BCE, thousands of years younger and built for daily life rather than as a standalone ceremonial complex. The famous Bronze and Iron Age city mound excavated by 19th-century archaeologists belongs to a much later era entirely, and the mountaintop tomb-sanctuary with giant stone heads dates to only the 1st century BCE, essentially recent by comparison.
Source: Britannica: Gobekli Tepe