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Is Turkey’s Megalithic Archaeological Site Göbeklitepe A Temple?
While shooting a documentary at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different historical interpretations of the site. An international group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast the T-shaped pillars as traces of humanity’s mystical past. Representatives of an NGO…
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The Mirror of Neolithic Art: How Çatalhöyük Confronts the Hubris of the Modernist Perspective
Illustrated by Asya Denk The theme for an exhibition that opened on June 4, 2026, at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), World’s First City Plan/Map, as part of my Arkeopolitics initiative, was met with reservations by a group of students from the Middle East Technical University’s faculty of architecture. They questioned how the map—exhibited in the Çatalhöyük section…
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Arkeopolitics: Unearthing Politics
Standing in the dust of Çatalhöyük—a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, yet virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law—a question haunted me: “How come no one told us about it?” My training at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye) was defined by a dominant doctrinal paradigm: that wherever households…