Soil sliding from hillside graves may explain some of Göbeklitepe's scattered bones

The young woman's grave is the closest thing this study has to a control. It was left mostly undisturbed, so the damage to her bones shows what burial alone can do at this site ^[6]. That gave Julia Gresky and Lee Clare of the German Archaeological Institute a baseline for the loose material, and in their PLOS One paper many of the fragments fit it ^[1][7]. According to Discover's account of the study, they conclude only that at least some fragments came downhill from graves higher on the mound ^[2].

The comparison set is small. The two graves hold at least four people between them ^[2]. Against them sit 928 fragments recovered from the rubble that buried the buildings ^[3]. Four skeletons are enough to show that this kind of damage is ordinary here. They are not enough to say what share of the scatter came from graves.

The woman's own room shows the proposed mixing inside a single grave. Skull fragments found above her in 2012 look like a man's, while her jaw and the rest of her skeleton are a woman's ^[11]. They may belong to someone else whose remains mixed into the soil of her room ^[11].

The spread of fragments is the weaker half of the argument. The authors say that if people had placed the bones on purpose, they would more likely have clustered in particular spots ^[9]. A scatter without clusters fits ground sliding off the slope. It would also fit other ways of churning a buried site, so it supports the slope account without singling it out.

The grooves are a different matter. Sliding soil cannot account for grooves carved into skull fragments ^[13]. Gresky proposed a skull cult in 2017 on the strength of three individuals with deeply grooved skulls ^[12]. Grooves now appear on remains from five people, two more than when she made the proposal ^[13][1]. At nearby Sefertepe, archaeologists found at least 21 skulls arranged in a small chamber, so people in the region did handle skulls on purpose ^[14]. Without distinct dates for Göbeklitepe's bones, researchers cannot yet say when its practices took place or whether they overlapped with Sefertepe's ^[15].

In my view the study's effect on the skull-cult case is specific. It takes the broken, scattered bones out of the ritual evidence and leaves the grooved skulls carrying the weight they carried before. It is also Gresky testing her own 2017 hypothesis against better material ^[12][1].

The graves also say something about what Göbeklitepe was. For its first two decades of excavation, researchers described it as a sanctuary for ceremonies, and more recent work has turned up houses and everyday activity ^[16]. The second grave, exposed in 2017, was dug through a building floor and held at least three people: a woman over 35, a man in his 20s and a girl between 11 and 14 ^[5]. Earlier remains there appear to have been shifted aside with each new burial, and the skulls were gathered in one corner ^[5][18].