Show notes
Cities are a form civilization often takes. They were never its starting condition.Since my first travels to Türkiye several years ago—through Istanbul, İzmir, and Ephesus—and also across archaeological sites in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, Göbekli Tepe has remained on my research radar**. Not as an archaeological revelation or a sudden conversion to deep prehistory, but because, as a narrative architect, I’m drawn to how settlement systems form—especially the ones hiding in plain sight.**Taş Tepeler has lingered in my mind in precisely this way, not as a city or urban form, but as a system of worldbuilding and story ecology that invites harder questions about how civilizations function beneath their visible forms: coordination, legitimacy, labor, belief, and power.The logic that structures human worlds long before they crystallize into cities.Taş Tepeler offers evidence of something more elusive and, in many ways, more instructive: civilization as coordinated life before urbanization. We don’t see clear evidence of dense settlement cores. No large concentration of permanent housing blocks. No streets, markets, or municipal hierarchy. None of the architectural signals we rely on to tell ourselves that “civilization has begun.”And yet the civic coordination is unmistakable. Across multiple sites, deliberately distributed across the landscape, we see coordination that exceeds kinship or coincidence. A shared symbolic grammar appears again and again, not as local improvisation but as something collectively maintained. Labor is organized at a scale that no single community could sustain alone. People gather repeatedly—on rhythms that imply scheduling, expectation, and return—rather than accident or crisis.Memory here is not stored in text or archive, but anchored in place. That anchoring is not passive. It is actively staged.There is so much exciting work going on now across the Taş Tepeler sites: archaelogical work, paleo-environmental research, cultural heritage management, and ethnoarchaeology. And recent excavations reveal narrative systems embedded directly into architecture: reliefs depicting sequences rather than symbols, animals and humans shown in motion and interaction, vessels and figurines designed to be handled, repositioned, and displayed. These are not static images. They appear to be prompts for retelling.Some installations appear deliberately constructed to accommodate small groups seated together, facing shared visual fields—spaces where stories could be enacted, repeated, and remembered through gesture and movement as much as through speech. If this is not theatre in the modern sense, it is unmistakably performative.In societies without writing, narrative is not entertainment. It is governance. Stories encode precedent, obligation, consequence, and identity. They allow rules to survive complexity without law codes, and memory to persist without archives.Taş Tepeler suggests that long before writing externalized memory onto clay or parchment, humans externalized it into space, sequence, and ritualized performance. Authority does not reside in an office or a law code; it operates across time and distance through participation, repetition, and shared obligation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way these communities treated their own past.Structures were not simply abandoned when they fell out of use. They were deliberately backfilled—often with more labor than their original construction required—sealed with care, and preserved as memory rather than erased. Human remains were curated, repositioned, and integrated into walls and floors over generations. New structures were built alongside old ones, not on top of them, maintaining a legible landscape of accumulated history.This is not disposal. It is archiving—performed spatially rather than textually. The way human remains appear at Taş Tepeler adds another layer to this memory architecture. Rather than isolated grave fields, fragments of human bones and prepared crania recur in niches, built contexts, and fill deposits. This integration of the human body into the fabric of communal space is not random. It is part of the same durable system of place-based remembrance that we see in architecture, narrative imagery, and the sequencing of built enclosures — a set of conventions that carries memory across generations without text or archive.What emerges is an early form of memory architecture: a system in which collective history is embedded into the built environment itself, allowing authority, identity, and obligation to persist across centuries without documents, institutions, or states.Civilization here is not remembered. It is inhabited. These are not private acts or isolated rituals. They are public behaviors, negotiated in common, and sustained across generations.That is what makes them _civic_—even in the absence of streets, councils, or walls. Settlement is not the outcome of farming. It is the social condition that makes farming useful.While Taş Tepeler is not a city, it is civilization.What Taş Tepeler suggests—quietly, almost reluctantly—is that civilization does not emerge first as a centralized object. It emerges as a distributed system: a network of meaning, obligation, and memory that exists before cities, and in some cases actively resists the gravitational pull toward them.This is where the familiar chicken-and-egg question finally loses its usefulness—not just archaeologically, but conceptually. Did farming produce settlement, or did settlement produce farming? Such a question assumes a linear sequence that the evidence at Taş Tepeler no longer supports. What appears instead is a feedback system already underway—one that begins with repeated aggregation, not merely subsistence innovation.Across multiple sites, we now see clear evidence of deliberately constructed domestic space: oval structures carved directly into bedrock, with hearths, storage areas, food-processing installations, and long-term reuse. These are not seasonal shelters. They are houses. They imply people staying put—day after day, year after year—well before domesticated agriculture enters the picture.What sustains that settlement is not farming, but managed abundance. Wild cereals, legumes, nuts, and game are exploited systematically, supported by water infrastructure carved into bedrock at a scale that allows year-round habitation. In other words, people are not settling because they farm. They are reorganizing subsistence because they have chosen to settle.Agriculture, in this light, is not the spark of civilization. It is one of several stabilizing responses to the pressures created when social life becomes durably collective.This matters enormously for Citizen One—and for how we think about cities more broadly—because the project has never been about equating cities with civilization. It has been about understanding how humans coordinate at scale—how they hold together shared purpose, legitimacy, and restraint—and what happens when those systems harden into infrastructure, bureaucracy, and power.Taş Tepeler reminds us that before civilization was something you could map, administer, or govern, it was something you had to sustain. Together.I seem to arrive at most things this way now—not through epiphany, but through brief conversations that refuse to let go.One of those conversations came by way of Irving Finkel, speaking casually on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Finkel is a senior curator at the British Museum, one of the world’s leading Assyriologists, and someone who has spent decades reading the residue of ancient bureaucracies line by line—cuneiform tablets, seals, inventories, contracts—the administrative afterlife of early civilizations. Fridman, a researcher and long-form interviewer known for giving specialists room to think aloud rather than perform certainty, let the moment pass without interruption.Perhaps without realizing he was lighting a fuse, Finkel mentioned a small object from Göbekli Tepe: a green stone, seal-like, easily overlooked in a plate of excavation photographs. To him, it wasn’t just an oddity. It was a clue. **A raindrop.**And from that raindrop, he suggested, you might reasonably infer a much larger, now-missing system—something like notation, something like administrative marking, something that begins to look uncomfortably close to writing, thousands of years earlier than we are usually prepared to allow.He was careful not to claim proof. He wasn’t rewriting history. He was doing something far more dangerous and far more interesting: asking whether our categories are too small for the evidence we already have.Even if no true writing existed here, the myriad administrative problems that writing later solves may already have been visible here.That question has stayed with me.Years of traveling through places like Istanbul—where time doesn’t move forward so much as stack vertically—and Ephesus, where public life, ritual practice, trade, and power were never separate systems but overlapping expressions of the same social logic, have trained me to be suspicious of clean origin stories. Cities don’t begin when textbooks say they do. They accrete. They remember. They metabolize earlier forms and pretend they invented themselves.Working with Alex McDowell—one of the pioneers of systems-based worldbuilding across film, design, and urban futures—sharpened that instinct. Our collaborations focus on applying narrative worldbuilding methods to real-world future city projects and strategic urban systems, using story not as ornament, but as a tool for systems thinking: a way to test how social behavior, governance, infrastructure, and technology intersect under pressure.In that context, imagining future cities is never about spectacle or prediction. It is about systems literacy. You begin by asking what must already exist—socially, psychologically, infrastructurally—for a place to function at all, and how those conditions evolve long before they become visible in buildings or policy.That kind of work trains you to see futures not as inventions, but as extrapolations of present systems under strain. You don’t design them by guessing. You design them by interrogating the present until its hidden assumptions surface.Once you learn to think that way, it becomes almost impossible to look at the past through clean origin stories. You start asking different questions: not when something appears, but what problem it was already solving.Which is why Taş Tepeler matters—not as a mystery, not as a provocation for fringe speculation, but as a stress test.We tend to like our civilizational beginnings clean and linear. Writing begins in Sumer. Cities follow. Religion formalizes. States emerge. History starts. It’s orderly. It’s teachable. It fits nicely into timelines and museum galleries.Göbekli Tepe, and now the wider Taş Tepeler constellation, doesn’t so much argue with that sequence as quietly render it insufficient to explain one early history of human civilization.Because once you accept what is already firmly established—that people in the 9th and 10th millennia BCE were capable of organizing large labor forces, planning and executing monumental architecture, carving complex symbolic and narrative imagery, and sustaining shared practices across generations—a position broadly supported by the ongoing Taş Tepeler research program in southeastern Türkiye²—then the sequence starts to feel less like a law of progress and more like a story we told ourselves because it was convenient.And once that sequence breaks, a more uncomfortable question surfaces.If humans were already capable of monumentality, coordination, narrative symbolism, and long-term planning before writing, before agriculture, before cities in any recognizable sense—or more precisely, before fully institutionalized agriculture and urbanism as we later define them³—then what else about “progress” have we misunderstood? What capacities did we assume had to be learned slowly, when in fact they may have been present all along?This isn’t a fringe argument. It’s not an attempt to smuggle a Cappadocian Atlantis into the conversation through the back door. It’s what happens when material evidence accumulates faster than the conceptual frameworks we use to organize it.Before any speculation, before any discussion of proto-writing or seals or perishable media, it’s worth being precise about what the evidence already tells us.Taş Tepeler refers to a network of early Neolithic sites in what is now southeastern Türkiye, centered in the Şanlıurfa region and including Göbekli Tepe, Karahantepe, Sayburç, and several others. These sites are not isolated anomalies. They form a connected landscape—geographically, symbolically, and almost certainly socially—a characterization now explicitly adopted by the Taş Tepeler research initiative itself².They date primarily to the 9th and 10th millennia BCE, within the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period, long before the appearance of urban centers, formal states, or known writing systems as conventionally defined in the Mesopotamian record⁴.What they contain is in its broad contours increasingly well-established. Large, intentionally planned communal structures. Finely carved stone pillars and reliefs produced with remarkable technical consistency. Repeated symbolic motifs that recur across multiple sites, suggesting shared meaning rather than local improvisation. And, perhaps most strikingly, evidence of coordinated labor at a scale once thought impossible for societies without agriculture or hierarchical governance.At Sayburç, in particular, we see something even more revealing: not just symbols, but scenes. Humans and animals depicted in relation to one another, caught in moments of interaction and tension. These are not abstract marks. They are narrative gestures—fragments of stories fixed in stone—widely discussed in the literature as some of the earliest known narrative relief scenes to date⁵.Taken together, this evidence forces a revision that doesn’t require speculation at all.Complex social organization does not depend on cities. It does not depend on kings. It does not depend on writing.What it depends on is shared meaning, reliable mechanisms of coordination, and durable ways of carrying memory forward in time.Everything else—writing, bureaucracy, formal institutions—comes later, when those earlier systems begin to strain under their own success.Taş Tepeler doesn’t tell us where civilization began.It tells us what civilization already looked like, long before we decided to start the clock.Administration Before Writing, Memory Before TextOnce you accept that Taş Tepeler represents coordinated social systems rather than isolated ritual curiosities, a different question begins to matter more than the one we usually rush toward.Not did they have writing?But how did they manage complexity over time?This is where Irving Finkel’s provocation becomes useful—not as a conclusion, but as a diagnostic tool.In the modern imagination, writing is often treated as a binary threshold: either a society has it or it doesn’t, and once it appears, everything else conveniently falls into place. Cities, laws, contracts, states. But that framing confuses the tool with the problem it was invented to solve.Writing doesn’t appear because humans suddenly become smarter. It appears because existing systems begin to exceed the limits of human memory, voice, and ritual repetition—a dynamic well documented in the emergence of administrative writing in late fourth-millennium Mesopotamia⁶.And Taş Tepeler already shows us social and administrative systems brushing up against those limits.To build, maintain, and reuse monumental communal spaces over generations requires more than inspiration. It requires continuity. Decisions remembered. Roles recognized. Permissions granted. Obligations honored. Authority made legible beyond the lifespan of any one individual.In later periods, we see exactly how societies solve that problem. They externalize memory. They invent administrative technologies: tallies, tokens, seals, ledgers, and eventually writing. Finkel’s career has been spent inside those systems, reading the residue of ancient bureaucracies line by line. When he looks at a seal-like object at Göbekli Tepe and raises an eyebrow, he’s not chasing mysticism. He’s recognizing a familiar logic.Seals, after all, are not art objects. They are instruments of trust.They exist to say: this action is authorized, this exchange is legitimate, this person has standing. Long before writing records poetry or theology, it records accountability—a pattern evident across early Mesopotamian administrative archives⁶.The uncomfortable implication is not that Göbekli Tepe had scribes quietly tallying grain in clay tablets nine thousand years ago. It’s that some form of administrative reasoning—some way of stabilizing social reality across time and distance—may have existed without leaving behind the kinds of artifacts we’ve trained ourselves to look for.This is where archaeology’s material bias matters. Stone survives. Fired clay survives. Leaves, wood, fiber, skin, and bark do not. Entire systems of notation could vanish without leaving a trace, especially if their primary function was temporary: marking permission, recording contribution, ratifying ritual status, then being discarded once the event passed.Even without writing, Taş Tepeler shows signs of administrative thinking. Repeated architectural grammar across sites. Standardized pillar forms. Consistent symbolic repertoires. Shared spatial logic. These are not improvisations. They are conventions. And conventions require enforcement.Which raises a quieter but more revealing possibility.What if Taş Tepeler didn’t need writing because it solved the same problem differently?Instead of abstract text, it used space. Instead of documents, it used monuments. Instead of archives, it used ritual repetition embedded in stone.In that model, authority doesn’t live in a ledger. It lives in place. Memory isn’t stored in text. It’s rehearsed seasonally, physically, communally. The enclosure itself becomes a kind of administrative device—a durable reference point against which behavior, obligation, and identity are measured.This doesn’t make writing inevitable or early. It makes it unnecessary—until scale, density, and speed overwhelm those older systems.And that, ultimately, is why the question of writing at Taş Tepeler is less important than it first appears.Whether or not any form of proto-notation existed in 9000 BCE, the social logic that eventually produces writing is already present. Humans are coordinating large groups. They are managing surplus and labor. They are stabilizing meaning across generations. They are negotiating authority without kings, law codes, or formal states.Writing, when it eventually arrives, will not invent civilization. It will bureaucratize something that already exists.Taş Tepeler doesn’t challenge the history of writing so much as it reframes it. Writing becomes not the spark of civilization, but the paperwork that follows once the fire is already burning.And that reframing matters—not only for how we understand the deep past, but for how we imagine the future.Because if civilization can operate—briefly, brilliantly, and at scale—without the tools we assume are indispensable, then the real question is not what technologies we add next.It’s which systems of meaning, coordination, and memory we are quietly eroding as we add them.Religion as Jurisdiction, Visual Narratives in Stone as Social CodeOnce you stop asking whether Taş Tepeler had writing and start asking how it governed itself, the role of religion shifts almost immediately.Not upward, toward belief. But inward, toward function.Modern language gets in the way here. When we hear “religion,” we tend to imagine doctrine, faith, metaphysics, gods demanding belief. But in early societies—especially societies on the cusp of sedentism—religion is less about what people believe and more about how they behave. It is not theology in the abstract sense. It is jurisdiction—or more precisely, one of several overlapping social technologies through which rules, limits, and legitimacy are made visible and enforceable⁷.At Taş Tepeler, the evidence suggests a world where religion provided the rules for living close together before formal law existed. These were communities navigating new pressures: repeated aggregation, resource concentration, emerging inequalities, disputes over labor and status, and the growing challenge of keeping violence contained within tolerable bounds—pressures widely recognized in Neolithic transition research⁸.In that context, religion doesn’t sit apart from politics or economics. It is one of the mechanisms that makes them possible.The communal enclosures are not simply sacred spaces. They are stages where authority is performed and renewed. They are places where people learn—through repetition, spectacle, and shared risk—what is permitted, what is forbidden, and what carries consequences. The carvings are not decorative. They are reminders.This becomes especially clear when you look closely at the iconography across Taş Tepeler. Predatory animals dominate the visual field. Leopards, boars, snakes, birds of prey. These are not gentle symbols. They are dangerous, unpredictable, and familiar to people who lived close to them. The message is not subtle: the world outside the enclosure is violent, and survival requires discipline—a reading consistent with prevailing interpretations of Göbekli Tepe iconography⁹.But the violence is not glorified. It is contained.The enclosures take the chaos of the wild and pin it into stone. They bring fear inside the social space, where it can be named, rehearsed, and controlled. This is not superstition. It is psychological technology: a means of shaping behavior, expectation, and restraint through shared symbolic experience⁷.At Sayburç, this logic sharpens even further. The relief there does something unusual for its time. It depicts not just animals, but interaction—humans and animals locked in relational scenes. Tension is implied. Agency is distributed. The figures are not symbols floating in abstraction; they are actors in a moment.That matters.Narrative scenes are not art for art’s sake. They encode precedent. They say: this happened, this is how it went, this is what it means. In societies without writing, narrative is how rules survive complexity. Stories are remembered because they are embodied, visual, and emotionally charged—a function widely discussed in cognitive and archaeological approaches to early narrative⁵.In this sense, Taş Tepeler may represent an early experiment in externalized moral memory. Not laws written down, but situations carved into stone. Not commandments, but scenarios. If you do this, this follows. If you cross that line, this is the cost.Religion here functions less like belief and more like an operating system—while still accommodating cosmology, identity, and meaning alongside regulation rather than reducing them to a single cause⁸. It stabilizes behavior in a world where old hunter-gatherer norms are no longer sufficient, but formal institutions have not yet emerged.This is also where status enters the picture.Monumental building does not happen in egalitarian societies without differentiation. Some people organize. Some carve. Some provision. Some officiate. The enclosures formalize those differences without fully hardening them into class. Prestige is earned, displayed, and reaffirmed through participation rather than inherited through title—a pattern observed in multiple early sedentary contexts¹⁰.But prestige is fragile. It requires constant renewal. Archaeological work at Göbekli Tepe has documented modified human cranial fragments that strongly support deliberate post-mortem treatment rather than casual discard. In a peer-reviewed study, Gresky, Haelm, and Clare describe three skull fragments bearing intentionally produced deep grooves, cut marks, and at least one drilled perforation—evidence interpreted as a previously undocumented variant of Early Neolithic “skull cult” practice at the site.¹⁵Beyond those modified crania, Göbekli Tepe has also produced a larger scatter of human bone fragments recovered largely from fill contexts—material that is archaeologically real, but contextually messy. It does not map neatly onto later cemetery logic, and it should not be treated as proof of a single standardized funerary program. The more defensible claim is narrower: the dead appear inside the same architectural and depositional systems that organize the living, and in at least some cases the human body was curated, altered, and reintroduced into communal space.For the broader Taş Tepeler region, reports of skulls and human remains appearing in architectural contexts exist, but the evidentiary standard varies by site and by publication status. A conservative way to state it—without importing hype—is this: across the Şanlıurfa Pre-Pottery Neolithic landscape, there is credible evidence that human remains sometimes occur in built contexts (niches, deposits, fills), and that this pattern is best understood as part of place-based memory practice rather than “burial” in the later institutional sense.None of these contexts, however, are conventional burials in the later sense; they are architectural depositions that seem tied to symbolic memory, spatial continuity, and communal identity rather than individual interment. This reinforces the view that memory, obligation, and social coherence were encoded in place long before formal funerary institutions emerged.Religion provides that renewal mechanism. It turns coordination into obligation and obligation into meaning. You don’t just help build the enclosure because you were told to. You do it because it situates you within a story that outlasts you.Seen this way, Taş Tepeler is not an early temple complex. It is a social laboratory.Before Classes, Before States — Specialization, Inequality, and a Fragile BalanceOnce religion is understood as a stabilizing system rather than a belief structure, the next pressure point comes into focus almost immediately.Labor.Taş Tepeler did not build itself. The stone was quarried, transported, shaped, erected, and maintained by human bodies over long stretches of time. That alone tells us something uncomfortable: these communities were already negotiating uneven contributions—a point widely acknowledged in discussions of monumentality and labor organization in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic¹¹.This is where discussions of “class” often go wrong, because we reach for categories that arrive much later and apply them too early. There are no kings here. No palaces. No tax rolls. No written law codes enforcing permanent hierarchy.But there is differentiation.Skill differentiates. Time differentiates. Access differentiates. And once people begin to gather regularly in the same places, differentiation does not disappear—it compounds—a dynamic familiar from anthropological studies of early specialization¹⁰.Stone carving at Taş Tepeler is not casual. The precision, scale, and consistency imply learned expertise passed across generations. That means apprenticeship. Which means time not spent hunting or gathering. Which means provisioning. Which means trust and obligation flowing in particular directions.Specialists do not emerge in isolation. They emerge because a society decides—explicitly or implicitly—that some people will be supported to do things others cannot or will not. That decision is never neutral.What’s striking about Taş Tepeler is how carefully that differentiation seems to have been managed. Prestige is visible, but it is not yet locked in. Authority exists, but it must be renewed through performance. No one appears to rule by fiat—an inference consistent with the absence of centralized elite architecture or burial differentiation at these sites¹¹.This is an unstable equilibrium.Too much inequality, and the coalition fractures. Too little differentiation, and the system cannot scale.Taş Tepeler appears to be navigating that narrow corridor with remarkable sophistication. The communal enclosures absorb surplus labor and convert it into shared meaning. Feasting redistributes calories. Ritual redistributes prestige. Narrative redistributes legitimacy—a pattern widely discussed in anthropological models of feasting economies¹².But none of this is permanent.The very success of these systems contains the seeds of their transformation. As gatherings grow larger and more frequent, as specialists become indispensable, as obligations stretch across wider networks, the old methods of regulation begin to strain.This is where later societies will turn to writing, formal law, standing authority, and eventually the state—not because these are superior forms of organization, but because they are more scalable under pressure—an argument advanced by multiple comparative studies of early state formation¹³.Taş Tepeler as Mirror — Why Ancient Story Ecologies Still MatterAt some point, Taş Tepeler stops being an archaeological subject and starts behaving like a mirror.Not because it offers answers we can copy, but because it exposes how narrow our assumptions about civilization have become.We are used to thinking of cities as machines: infrastructure layered on infrastructure, governed by law, optimized by technology, stabilized by administration. When those systems fail, our instinct is always to add more structure—more data, more enforcement, more abstraction.But Taş Tepeler reminds us that the deepest work of civilization happens before any of that.It happens at the level of shared meaning.Long before humans formalized power into states or memory into text, they built places where stories could be held collectively—places where behavior was shaped not by enforcement alone, but by participation, repetition, and consequence.What made them work was not technology, but narrative coherence.This is where narrative architecture becomes more than metaphor.Working with Alex McDowell has reinforced this lesson again and again: worlds do not fail because they lack innovation. They fail because their stories fracture—a principle McDowell has articulated repeatedly in systems-based worldbuilding practice¹⁴.Taş Tepeler shows us a society grappling with that exact problem at the moment it first appears. Humans settling down. Aggregating. Specializing. Pushing beyond the limits of face-to-face trust. And instead of immediately inventing hierarchy or bureaucracy, they doubled down on shared narrative, embodied ritual, and visible memory.They built civilization out of story first, and only later out of administration.That inversion matters.Because Taş Tepeler does not tell us to abandon writing, states, or cities. It tells us something far more unsettling: that these are secondary technologies, layered on top of older, more fragile systems of coordination that we barely understand anymore.Civilization did not begin when humans learned to write things down. It began when they learned how to live with one another at scale without tearing themselves apart.That experiment did not end in 9000 BCE.It is still ongoing.Footnotes1. Finkel, Irving. Interview with Lex Fridman. _Lex Fridman Podcast_, YouTube, accessed Dec 13, 2025.2. Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Taş Tepeler Project Overview. Şanlıurfa Archaeological Research Program, ongoing.3. Özdoğan, Mehmet. “Neolithic Cultures at the Crossroads: Early Sedentism and Subsistence Strategies in Anatolia.” Antiquity 85, no. 328 (2011): 495–508.4. Englund, Robert K. “The State of Decipherment of Proto-Cuneiform.” In The Origins of Writing, edited by Stephen Houston, 237–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.5. Özdoğan, Mehmet, and Necmi Karul. “A New Early Neolithic Narrative Relief from Sayburç.” Antiquity 96, no. 389 (2022): 1–15.6. Nissen, Hans J., Peter Damerow, and Robert K. Englund. Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.7. Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.8. Hodder, Ian. The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.9. Schmidt, Klaus. Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: Ex Oriente, 2010.10. Hayden, Brian. “Feasting Theory and the Emergence of Inequality.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, no. 3 (2001): 299–339.11. Dietrich, Oliver et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities.” Antiquity 86, no. 333 (2012): 674–695.12. Dietler, Michael. “Feasts and Commensal Politics.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7, no. 1 (2001): 65–114.13. Scott, James C. Against the Grain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.14. McDowell, Alex. “Worldbuilding as a Design Process.” Journal of Design and Science, MIT Media Lab, 2019.15. Gresky, Julia, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare. “Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult.” Science Advances 3, no. 6 (2017): e1700564. (PubMed record: 28782013). 16. Anadolu Agency. “Neolithic burial traditions / skull modifications reported from Şanlıurfa PPNA/PPNB sites.” This is a public episode. 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