*** Gobekli Tepi and Chaco Canyon Necropolii *** In the last TwiX, we saw how the Tepi Temples in Anatolia might represent the zodiac. But what were they used for? What was their religious or ceremonial function? These ancient Tepi Temples contain a cluster of circular enclosures, likely symbolising the zodiac and therefore the heavens above, with many rectangular buildings behind them. The circular enclosures often contain benches around the perimeter, and two monolithic standing stones in the center, most probably representing the Sun and Moon that often stand at the center of a zodiac. But where else in the world might we find these same elements? Ah yes, in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. In Chaco we see several large building complexes that were initially thought to be towns; or, since the entire 'settlement' is walled, perhaps we might call them citadels. The handful of these so-called citadels that reside within the Chaco Canyon all contain a cluster of seemingly ritual circular enclosures, plus many rectangular buildings behind them. The circular enclosures often contain benches around the perimeter, and sockets in the center that may have contained standing stones or tree-trunks. And the entire Chaco site is replete with solar and lunar alignments. So even on the surface, we can see many similarities between the Gobekli and Chaco sites that are intriguing, to say the least. But there is more. These Chaco Canyon sites - especially the main Pueblo Bonito ‘citadel’ - have been reevaluated in recent years, because there is no real sign that these vast citadels were actually lived in. Many of the tall ‘apartment blocks’, which reach up to four floors in height, have no easy access (no corridors); the individual rooms have no natural light; and there are no chimneys to allow fires for cooking or for warmth. In other words, these multi-story room complexes are completely hopeless and unusable as apartment blocks. So what are these vast citadels, and their prison-like rooms, really for? Since these citadels are undoubtedly aligned with Solar and Lunar alignments and transits, archaeologists are now suggesting that Chaco was a seasonal ritual center. People came to this temple site during the spring and autumn months, when weather conditions were more tolerable, and paid homage to the gods. And perhaps some of the more influential visitors were initiated into the mysteries of the cosmos at this great temple site, with the circular enclosures representing the zodiac or the cosmos, just as I have proposed for Gobekli and Karahan Tepe. Chaco Canyon may have been the Eleusinian Mystery School of the Americas. Whatever the spiritual purpose of these circular enclosures may have been; with their secret rituals complete the faithful pilgrims would have eventually travelled back to their homes, leaving the site in the care of a few caretakers, guardians, and priests. In other words, the Chaco Canyon temple complexes may have been akin to the Masjid al-Haram temple site in modern Mecca; a name which either means Sacred Mosque or Forbidden Mosque depending upon who you ask. Just as in modern Saudi Arabia, peoples from all over north and south America may have made a Hajj-style pilgrimage to Chaco, at least once in their lifetime, to gain the blessings of the gods. This new reappraisal would actually make a great deal of sense for the Chaco site. But if Chaco was a seasonal temple, was Gobekli Tepe a Hajj pilgrimage site too? Not a settlement, nor a simple temple for the local population, but a site of pilgrimage for peoples from all over Mesopotamia? Were the thousands of grind-stones discovered at Gobekli not simply for making bread for the local population, but to cater for the thousands of pilgrims who made the long summer trek to this sacred site? (Note: I have already made a similar proposal for the Giza complex in Egypt. The large bakery and butchery facilities discovered at Giza were not made to feed the construction workers, but to cater for the pilgrims who arrived at this premier pilgrimage site of the Mediterranean. These facilities were especially useful for the many bread and meat offerings that pilgrims were expected to give to the gods; thus creating a new class of perennially overweight priests.) While these suggestions are quite possible, the design of the Pueblo Bonito ‘citadel’ in Chaco Canyon may actually give us a better understanding of these ancient sites. What of all those completely uninhabitable prison-like rooms that line the perimeter of this site, what were they really for? Due to their peculiar design, it has been seriously proposed that these rooms or cells were merely structural - designed to buttress the large and straight back wall of the site. But I don’t think that five rows of cells or rooms would be needed for the structural integrity of the rear wall. And even if the designer did think this was necessary, these rooms could still have been equipped with corridors, chimneys, and skylights to make them more habitable. So why this curious design? Perhaps we should travel back to Edessa (to Gobekli Tepe), once more, for an answer to this conundrum. Just to the southeast of Edessa-Gobekli is the royal Edessan necropolis of Sogmatar, which contains a series of truncated round-tower ’tombs’ atop some small rolling hills; containing rolling-stone doors and descending passageways down to small subterranean caverns. Although these towers and chambers are similar to Egyptian pyramids in their overall design, these were not tombs in the Egyptian tradition, but necropoli in the Judaic tradition. These tower-tombs were actually ‘sarcophagi’ (literally, ‘body-eaters’) where the bodies of the dead were laid out in the small subterranean caverns for a few years to decompose. Eventually, the bare bones of the departed would have been gathered up and taken home in an ossuary-box. This, I believe, is what the uninhabitable ‘apartment rooms’ at Pueblo Bonito were for. Just as at Sogmatar, Chaco was a vast necropolis for these peoples, which resided in a remote and enigmatic location in Chaco Canyon - just as Sogmatar is in a remote and enigmatic location in the undulating ‘badlands’ to the southeast of Edessa-Gobekli. Andrew Collins once described Sogmatar as being ‘sinister’ - and while the site does not really justify that term, it is certainly occult (hidden) and enigmatic. Thus people would come to Chaco Canyon with their dead, from all over the central Americas, to perform a sacred ritual of death and perhaps rebirth in one of the many circular enclosures. These are round ritual enclosures that may have represented the zodiac and thus the cosmos, just as at the Tepi Temple sites. With the ritual complete, the body would be respectfully placed in one of the many rectangular storehouses at the back of the Pueblo Bonito site (or one of the other nearby ‘citadel’ sites), until the body had completely decomposed. This was an uninhabitable room that had been deliberately designed without windows or chimneys, to minimise smells and flies and to promote a more esoteric decay process. Entombed in perennial darkness, just as we see at the Sogmatar necropolis, the decaying deceased could face towards the curving and revolving transit of the Sun- and Moon-gods, for their souls to merge as one with the divine. Then a few years later, the family would come to collect the bones and handsomely reward the guardians of the necropolis site for their services. While this makes a great deal of sense for the Chaco Canyon site, does this also describe and explain the nature and usage of Gobekli and Karahan Tepi Temples? Were the Anatolian Tepis necropolis centers, with the dead passing through the rituals of death and rebirth in the circular enclosures, before being laid to rest in the square ‘store rooms’ that lay just behind? Is that why these small square rooms all contain miniature T-pillars, marking them as being ritual rather than profane rooms? If so, this would be an interesting development in our understanding, because it would not only imply fairly sophisticated technologies to construct these megalithic enclosures, but also a fairly sophisticated transport network to supply these centers with sufficient trade to justify their existence. How far can one travel with a corpse, to reach a necropolis? Sogmatar is only 30 km from Edessa, or just over a day’s travel, so within easy reach. But the road network that surrounds Chaco Canyon suggests that people travelled from much further afield to reach the Chaco Canyon necropolis. So which prosperous cities were served by this vast and obviously wealthy necropolis site? Where did their funerary trade come from, and how far did it travel? That New Mexico may have had a large necropolis complex should not be too unexpected, as many cities around the world constructed similar complexes. Although this does imply a thriving and wealthy population residing within perhaps 150 km of Chaco. In addition to the royal necropolis at Sogmatar, the cities of Edessa and Harran also had the plebeian necropolis at Shuayp, which is a vast complex of underground tunnels and niches for the dead. But these are haphazard complexes, displaying none of the architectural refinement and celestial symbolism of Gobekli and Chaco. In a similar fashion, both Rome and Paris had extensive underground catacombs for the upper and middle classes, with the Paris complex being said to hold the remains of over six million people. Yes, sending the dearly departed safely into the afterlife was big business in these early eras, and could easily have supported the vast constructions that can be seen at Chaco Canyon and Gobekli Tepi -- if there were sufficiently large populations in the region to supply the trade. The only fly in the ointment for this new comparison and exploration of these sites, is the vast time and distance that exists between these very similar temple complexes. Gobekli is being dated to about 11,500 years ago, while Chaco is being dated to just 1,000 years ago - which represents a gaping 10,500 year lacuna between their potentially conflated usage and chronologies. Could traditions as similar as this really span continents and millennia, while remaining true and faithful to their original designs and traditions? Is that really possible? Having said that, do note that we have seen similar geographic and chronological lacuna before. I have already written about the T-shaped Taule monoliths of the Balearics, which reside in circular enclosures in a very similar fashion to the Gebekli and Karahan sites. Indeed, the Balearic Taules are also closely associated with subterranean pillar halls, which are more rudimentary than the subterranean pillar-halls at Gobekli and Karahan, but are nevertheless remarkably similar. And yet despite the many similarities between these sites, there are 4,000 km and 8,000 years between them - and that is a problem. The other problem with dating Pueblo Bonito in particular, is the lack of carbon-14 dating on the site. In 1996 Windes and Ford completed the ‘Chaco Wood Project’, which attempted to date the Pueblo Bonito ‘necropolis’ by investigating the many large wooden lintels and supports used throughout the site. However, they only used dendrochonology, rather than C14 dating, and derived a 250-year period of occupation from the 9th to 12th centuries AD. But why would you not want to confirm these tree-ring dates, with the more reliable C14 dating method? Especially as these are pristine wood samples, which would have experienced little C14 contamination from limestones or soot from hearth-fires etc: As I have mentioned many times previously, there are manifold problems with dendrochronology. The first is that tree-ring growth and therefore width can be determined by: precipitation, canopy cover, pests, nutrients, CO2, cloud-cover, surface orientation, disease, and perhaps also by temperature. A tree in a desert will not grow very well, despite the temperatures being very high; which is why I suspect that many trees are better suited to monitoring precipitation rather than temperature. This was summed up in the 19th century by Liebig’s Barrel Law, which stated that a tree would be limited by the least available growth factor from the list above. Perhaps a good test of tree sensitivities, would be to compare forest oak trees with willows, which grow by perennial rivers. If willow tree-rings can be directly compared with forest oak rings, then we might have more confidence that temperature is more dominant than moisture; but I have not read of such a research project. In addition, many of the growth factors just mentioned are either local, regional, or species dependent, so how can you possibly compare a lowland juniper log, with reference tree-ring data from a bristlecone high up in the Rocky Mountains? A bristlecone may suffer a poor year (thin rings) due a lack of temperature high up in the Rockies, while a lowland tree may have had a great year (fat rings) due to increased moisture. And never mind these regional differences, how can you rely on any tree-ring width? A quick personal study of a recently harvested forest in Wales presented different tree-ring widths from trees in the very same forest (which were all planted at the same time). And some logs displayed different ring-widths within the very same trunk, so a ring-core taken in the 3-o’clock position would be different from a core taken in the 7-o’clock position, and thus the calculated dendrothermology temperatures and dendrochronology dates would be different within the same tree-trunk. The same is true of strip-bark trees like the bristlecone, where periodic bark stripping promotes a burst of ring-growth. So do we interpret those suddenly wider rings as representing climatic temperature, or a natural growth stimulus? Furthermore, if archaeologists determine that the Chaco site is less than 2,000 years old, are the dendrochronologists going to even bother checking Chaco tree-ring signatures with data from 11,000 years ago? Probably not. The result of all these many problems is that dendrochronology can be regarded as modern snake-oil science, especially if it is not supported by C14 dating which has fewer potential errors. And so the ‘Chaco Wood Project’ is not really worth the paper it was printed upon (nor worth the electrons on my screen). Having said all this, there are other factors from Chaco and Gobekli that point towards a great gulf of time existing between these two sites. Gobekli appears to have firmly existed within the pre-pottery neolithic era, with flint-working and stone bowls being in use throughout the site’s chronology. Conversely, at Chaco there is an entire hill composed of discarded pottery shards, thought to be the result of offerings to the gods. (Although the similar pottery hill in Rome was based on economics rather than religion, because it was too expensive to recycle wine and oil amphoras.) So it is likely that there is indeed a huge chronological gulf between the Gobekli, Balearic, and Chaco ‘necropolis' sites. With the design for these theorised ‘cities of the dead’ slowly moving ever westwards over the millennia. But how could this have been achieved, without any evidence for intermediate necropolis sites over those missing millennia? And without any real evidence for early Atlantic crossings? This is a mystery still to be solved. But the similarities and connections remain. Images: a. b. Gobekli Tepe. c. d. Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon. Note: The author has personally visited Chaco, Gobekli, Shayp, Sogmatar, and the Rome catacombs. Ralph Ellis