Anthropomorphic Imagery at Göbekli Tepe

In 1965, during an excursion from Friedrich Karl Dörner’s excavations at Arsameia, an enigmatic, approximately 80cm-high statue was acquired from a farmer. It has a long head which towers over a highly abstract, curved body. If the arms and hands which were holding the head of another figure on the narrow front side of the sculpture had not been clearly depicted, its anthropomorphic character would have been hard to guess. At the time of discovery, the statue remained a mystery and perhaps would have been disregarded altogether as some kind of oddity had not Harald Hauptmann`s excavations at Nevalı Çori (1983–1991) and Klaus Schmidt’s work at Göbekli Tepe (1995–2014) proven that this ‘Kilisik-statue’ was, in fact, a prime example of one of the ways in which early Neolithic people represented the human body. The anecdote shows the enormous influx of knowledge our understanding of early Neolithic imagery has undergone in the last few decades. We currently possess a fairly large and still growing corpus of three-dimensional human and animal images from that period that mostly awaits thorough study.

The site that has produced the most extensive record of imagery so far is Göbekli Tepe. Its late excavator, Klaus Schmidt, has published a general review of the site which includes many comments on the imagery as well as several papers on the sculptures. He also initiated a catalogue. This current contribution sets out to give an overview of the anthropomorphic sculpture of Göbekli Tepe and its current interpretation which has been roughly outlined in a previous German language contribution.