NEW HYPOTHESIS! Göbekli Tepe: Houses of Death & Excarnation

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Published Oct 24, 2026

As archaeological evidence has confirmed in recent years, the 10-11,500-year-old pre-pottery Neolithic sites of Karahan Tepe, Gobekli Tepe, Sayburc and so on, were all settlements.

Some buildings certainly had a domestic function, but others were communal, having, what the experts call, a special purpose.

With benches often situated around the outside, it’s easy to think that this special purpose was religious or ritualistic. But some think that our ancestors were merely feasting and drinking primitive beer around a fire inside. Maybe the leaders of the settlements used the buildings to address the wider population – to organise the settlement in some kind of village meetings.

The truth is, one of these interpretations could be correct, all of them could be, or none of them could be. Furthermore, each different oval communal building could have even had its own specific function, i.e. one was for rituals, one for feasting, one for meetings, one for entertainment and so on.

Right now, all we can do is speculate over the use of these prehistoric communal buildings because, apart from their material remains, we don’t really know anything about them or the lives of the people that used them.

In this video, I'll be presenting evidence for an idea that came to me last week, that maybe the communal buildings of Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Sayburç and so on, were very much used for rites and rituals, but ones so alien to us today that we haven’t even considered it. What if we’re looking at houses of the dead, where the spectacle was watching the remains of somebody being eaten by animals – watching the human body return to nature, so to speak - a type of excarnation.

Watch the video to learn more about the idea and why it may actually make sense, and the repercussions for the history of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

Video Contents:
0:00 Introduction
0:27 Communal Special Purpose Buildings
4:40 Ancient Statues of the Dead?
6:59 Statues of Predators and Scavengers
7:30 Are Oval Buildings Houses of the Dead?
9:40 Excarnation and Sky Burials Around the World
12:12 Evidence for Excarnation in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic
14:38 Detached Statue Heads
15:50 Skulls & Long Bones Discovered
16:47 Tying the Evidence Together
18:20 Did Göbekli Tepe Building D Contain Water and Fish?
19:24 Is the Hypothesis Credible?
21:37 Were the Oval Buildings Roofed or Open Air?
22:30 Concluding Remarks

All images and footage in this video are either my own, taken from Google Earth, Google Images or the sources listed below. Please subscribe to Ancient Architects, Like the video, and please leave a comment below. Thank you.

#göbeklitepe #karahantepe #ancientarchitects