Inspired individuals and charismatic leaders

Abstract

Recent fieldwork at Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) Göbeklitepe has revealed a life-size limestone statue of a wild boar in Special Building D, which, alongside discoveries from nearby contemporaneous sites, broadens our understanding of late hunter-forager communities, including the presence of (archaeologically speaking) invisible decision-makers. Evidence points to three groups from which these charismatic leaders could have emerged: storytellers, hunters and ritual experts. An important function of these leaders was to uphold traditional values in the face of changing lifeways in the Early Holocene, a period referred to here as the ‘hunter-gatherer crisis’. This paper also includes a summary of recent excavation results from Göbeklitepe.

Keywords

• Göbeklitepe
• Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN)
• social hierarchisation
• adaptive cycles
• hunter-gatherer crisis