Several contemporary settlements have been excavated: Nevalı Çori, Jerf el Ahmar, Mureybet. So we know what the houses, communal buildings and granaries looked like. Göbekli doesn't look anything like that.
The location also reveals that it wasn't used to live, gather food or trade: It's built on top of a rocky hill without access to food or water. You don't extract 15 tons pillars, carve them and move them atop a hill to make things prettier.
The buildings themselves are the biggest proof. No roof, inconvenient and small entrance, holes to let the soul escape. The carvings found at Göbekli were also found on other sites which were associated with religion and death. One example would be the carving of vultures and headless bodies. Vultures which are associated with death and the ritual of excarnation: the floor of the buildings were made waterproof and sloped to allow the draining of bodily liquids. We know that people in that area would bury bodies without their head or even reopen the grave to remove the head. They also have been known to put plaster on skulls and keep the heads around.
"It's used for ritual/religious purposes" is an archaeologist's polite way of saying "we don't know what it's for, but it was probably central to the rulers of society".
The strict functional differentiation of society into subfields such as politics, education, science, law etc that characterises modernity, emerged only over the last couple of centuries. In the past they were really much more intermeshed. What we mean by religion today has relatively little relevant to ancient societies.
Weren't castes or other social segments strongly associated with certain roles actually fairly strongly established? E.g., "merchant / trader caste", "workman" (with numerous sub-classes: farmer, shephard, woodsman, miner, drover, labourer), artisan", "maid/servant", soldier", priest", ruler/leader"? Also often sage / teacher, and storyteller / musician.
Not the stratification of professional roles we see today (which is pretty staggering) still breaks down not too far from these categories. The US BLS EEO-1 Job Classification Guide's top level breaks down to the following major classifications, each with the indicated number of subclassifications:
I've looked further into how labour has been classified over the past 200 years or so. Particularly interesting is that the US Census Occupation Codes hit their high-water mark (in terms of number of classifications) not recently, but in 1920.
From Integrated Public use Microdata Series, classifications by year:
Monkeyget|10 years ago
The buildings themselves are the biggest proof. No roof, inconvenient and small entrance, holes to let the soul escape. The carvings found at Göbekli were also found on other sites which were associated with religion and death. One example would be the carving of vultures and headless bodies. Vultures which are associated with death and the ritual of excarnation: the floor of the buildings were made waterproof and sloped to allow the draining of bodily liquids. We know that people in that area would bury bodies without their head or even reopen the grave to remove the head. They also have been known to put plaster on skulls and keep the heads around.
Gravityloss|10 years ago
mafribe|10 years ago
The strict functional differentiation of society into subfields such as politics, education, science, law etc that characterises modernity, emerged only over the last couple of centuries. In the past they were really much more intermeshed. What we mean by religion today has relatively little relevant to ancient societies.
dredmorbius|10 years ago
Not the stratification of professional roles we see today (which is pretty staggering) still breaks down not too far from these categories. The US BLS EEO-1 Job Classification Guide's top level breaks down to the following major classifications, each with the indicated number of subclassifications:
I've looked further into how labour has been classified over the past 200 years or so. Particularly interesting is that the US Census Occupation Codes hit their high-water mark (in terms of number of classifications) not recently, but in 1920.From Integrated Public use Microdata Series, classifications by year:
https://usa.ipums.org/usa/intro.shtml https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/OCC#codes_section
My favourite of all the occupations comes from the 1880 classification: #309, "Gentleman".https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3832wx/occupat...