“Our Place: Our Place in the World”

The 'Neolithic revolution' in southwest Asia saw the emergence of large, settled communities, who defined themselves in terms of architecture and sculptured representations - 'our place'. Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey is one of several 12,000-year-old sites that are producing monumentality and rich symbolism that challenge the archaeologists' ability to interpret; we think that they were defining themselves in relation to a cosmos - 'our place in the world'. Göbekli Tepe is pivotal, and it needs fixing chronologically. And we need new kinds of inter-disciplinary collaboration in order to ask how the art and architecture relates to the emergence of these first permanent communities, and are we seeing religious representations that involve deities and understandings of the cosmos? We archaeologists need to collaborate with specialists in comparative religion, architectural and art theory, cognitive and evolutionary psychology, and sociologists using social network theory. Rather than simply meeting together, we need to focus joint attention on specific problems. An initiating workshop will bring together specialists from other disciplines to meet the excavators of new Neolithic sites in southeast Turkey and north Syria, and to see first-hand the exciting discoveries. The workshop will generate new directions for inter-disciplinary research. Thirdly, the collaborators in the project will unfold the early results of the inter-disciplinary research to a wider audience of archaeologists and associated researchers working in the Neolithic of southwest Asia at a larger-scale conference, designed to produce both a scholarly and popular publications. Over the lifetime of the project, we will devise new inter-disciplinary modes in prehistoric research, and seek to change the way that archaeologists and the public understand an important formative period in human history.