Prehistoric Cuisine at Göbekli Tepe

A Mystical Place

Go to Neolithic Göbekli Tepe (11,600 years old), and you will find one of the most mysterious archaeological sites in Turkey. The huge T-shaped stone pillars carved with humans and fantastical animals form impressive circles. Evidence from the site reveals people gathered there seasonally in extraordinary numbers. But for what purpose? Religious rites? Games? Socializing? Meeting the perfect life partner? (Photo above of an overview of the site by Teomancimit Wiki.)

Beer and Barbecue at Göbekli Tepe?

Admittedly, what they ate may not strike you as the most important question to answer about this strange location. However, it’s both, really important, and quite puzzling. How did a Neolithic hunter-gatherer culture feed so many people without draining the local resources? The evidence points to the pre-agriculture stage of development, so they did it without growing the food.

At the site, archaeologists found plenty of fossilized bones and some limited grain evidence. Originally, the hypothesized menu painted a picture of a giant barbecue with beer as a rare ceremonial treat. The stereotypical meat-centered prehistoric diet—featured in the popularized paleo diet—gained traction as the answer.

Looking at the Evidence

But then, Laura Dietrich and other archaeologists took a much smarter look at the total picture. They began to look for the “invisible cooks.” Instead of an all-meat diet—implausible for many reasons—she and others have gradually uncovered and analyzed the evidence pointing to a diet rich in the starches that the “paleo diet” fad claims early humans weren’t evolved to eat (not true, for starters).

Big stone vats of cooked grain porridges and stews fed these gatherings. They also ate a lesser amount of bread. Not to mention, they drank a lot of fermented grain, i.e., beer—not the rarity first assumed.

A Kitchen, not a ‘Rock Garden’

One of the key food clues at Göbekli Tepe came from the dramatic number of grinding stones at the site. Previous archaeologists had dismissed the football-field-sized area crammed with grinding stones as the “rock garden.” Dietrich catalogued and studied them. After hours of grinding on replicas, she can identify whether a prehistoric stone was used to create fine-ground bread flour or rougher porridge grains. Hence, she can roughly identify the ratio of bread to porridges/stews. The sheer number of stones with grinding evidence—more than 10,000—shows what the main meal ingredient really was–grains. Providing you don’t dismiss the grinding stones as too boring to examine.

Speaking of Kitchens

From other very early sites in Greece comes further evidence of pre-agricultural dependence on gathered grains. Here are some quoted paragraphs from the article I especially enjoyed:

To work out what people were eating, archaeologists are turning to previously ignored sources of evidence, such as charred bits of food. They’re the mistakes of the past: stews and porridge left on the fire for too long, or bits of bread dropped in the hearth or burnt in the oven…

Until the past few years, these hard-to-analyse remnants of ruined meals were rarely given a second look. “It’s just a difficult material. It’s fragile, ugly stuff,” says Andreas Heiss, an archaeobotanist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. “Most researchers just shied away.” Pottery sherds encrusted with food remains were cleaned off or discarded as ‘crud ware’, and charred bits of food were dismissed as unanalysable ‘probable food’ and shelved or thrown out.

The first step towards changing that perception was to go back to the kitchen. That was the inspiration of Soultana Valamoti, an archaeobotanist at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece who, not coincidentally, is also a passionate home cook. Valamoti spent the early years of her career toting buckets and sieves from one excavation site to another across Greece, all while combing museum storerooms for ancient plant remains to analyse. The work convinced her there was an untapped wealth of evidence in burnt food remains — if she could find a way to identify what she was looking at.

More than 20 years ago, Valamoti decided to turn her lab into an experimental kitchen. She ground and boiled wheat to make bulgur, and then charred it in an oven to simulate a long-ago cooking accident… By comparing the burnt remains to 4,000-year-old samples from a site in northern Greece, she was able to show that the ancient and modern versions matched, and that this way of preparing grain had its roots in the Bronze Age.

Careful Archaeology

I loved this article, especially as a home cook who regularly turns my kitchen into an experimental lab to create historically plausible dishes for my fictional Bronze Age characters. I’ve always distrusted the simplistic view of early man sitting around eating mainly hunks of meat. Nice to know “Neolithic” or “paleo” actually meant a balanced diet with a significant amount of carbs. And it doesn’t surprise me that female archaeologists led the way for this sensible approach to the puzzling question, “How did a Neolithic culture cook up enough food for the massive feasting that happened at this beautiful and mystical archaeological site?”

Someday we may find some further clues about what they gathered there to do.

Click here to read this fascinating article in Nature, “How ancient people fell in love with bread, beer and other carbs.” You’ll find further engaging details and learn what these prehistoric cooks did to make grain into a storable “fast-food.”

Read more about Göbekli Tepe on this website here, here, or here.