Archaeology and the Public

Jimmy Corsetti (apparently hungover, unshaven with dark glasses and a stupid hat): "A detailed analysis of the dire circumstances occurring at Gobekli Tepe, and some awesome behind the scenes shots of when I “snuck” into Gobekli Tepe with him. It's worse than I thought"... Wandering Wolf Productions (@WWolfProd) Gobekli Tepe: Olive Trees Removed! Shocking Footage! (2025 Update) w/‪@BrightInsight‬ and ‪@NikkianaJones‬ @WWolfProd 

This is distressing watching. I have always said that archaeology is not rocket science" and the mouthy US YouTubers in this video clearly think they understand everything about the discipline and as such are uniquely entitled to trash the work of the DAI archaeological team, the Turkish heritage management officers and any archaeologist attempting to engage with them, this comes out very well in this video. What also comes over in this video is that all three of these "content producers" understand about as much of what they are looking at as one of the goats in the fields outside the fence. Zero. That is despite them writing pages and pages of rant about how "only they" "know" what's what here. What a total eyeopener, it seems I might have severely overestimated the understanding of members of the public. 

Although the film editor Mike Collins drops some real howlers in the first part and at the end, I propose in this post concentrating on the central part of the video. Jimmy Corsetti  wearing a ridiculous hat indoors explaining what he thinks he sees when on the walkway looking directly down onto the site. Let me remind everyone what the site looks like, what he is looking at. What do you see here?

And what does Jimmy Corsetti see?    Here's the video (transcript below)

Posted on You Tube by Wandering Wolf​ 3rd April.

Here's what he had to say:

"So, I’ve been out here and just got back—been walking around for about 30 minutes. A few things stand out, one of which is, this is worse than I thought. Look at all this debris. These stones—there’s so much that could stand to be removed. Are you telling me they couldn’t have cleared more than this by now?(1)

If you really stop and study the site, it’s hard to understand how they haven’t cleared more of it. All the photos I’ve seen online didn’t truly convey the reality. They didn’t paint a full picture of just how much more of this could’ve already been excavated. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is this infrastructure they’ve put in—the viewing platforms, the steel frames stabbing directly into the archaeological site itself (2). That tells me there’s no real intention to fully excavate the area. They’d have to dismantle those platforms to do it, and it doesn’t look like that’s on the table.

Then there's number three — this whole debate about whether the site was purposely buried or just covered by natural landslides (3). What archaeologists are now saying is, “No, no, it was a result of landslides from the hill above.” But I’m looking at that hill right now, and I’m sorry—it just doesn’t add up. The hill is right there, and yet the pillars are still standing upright, surrounded by these stones. If this was a landslide, those pillars would’ve been knocked over or destroyed. But they weren’t. This gives every reason to believe that the stones were intentionally stacked and that the site was purposely buried, just like Klaus Schmidt—the original archaeologist here—originally thought. I’m just not seeing how that little hill could explain all of this. It’s not big enough to justify saying it slid down in multiple landslides over time. I’ve got extensive video and photos from up there. I’ve looked. It just doesn’t make sense to me. In my mind, everything here validates the idea of intentional burial.

But honestly, man, my big takeaway, my gut reaction, is just this: they could’ve removed more by now. Look at all these stones. Look at how much is still buried. Why haven’t they done it?

It’s either that they won’t—or at least, they haven’t—and that’s inexcusable. From an archaeological excavation standpoint, this is actually worse than I thought. And we haven’t even gone to the areas where the trees are, or around the upper perimeter. There’s more to see, sure, but from what I’ve already seen?  Disappointing. The excavation is way less than what it could be. I don’t know what else to say.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Even just removing a few more feet of earth would make a difference. So why haven’t they done it?

There are still plenty of pillars buried in the earth all the way around here. Why won’t they excavate those? Why won’t they expose what’s depicted on them?

Because as it stands now, most of the pillars are still so deeply buried that you can’t even see what’s carved into them. And if they’re not going to uncover that — man, get out of here.

Where to begin? 

(1) "All this debris", "These stones", "look at all these stones" , "a few more feet of earth". Look at the vertical view of the site above. Rightly or wrongly, the archaeologists have just removed the infill of several sunken oval structures with stone T-shaped pillars together with parts of the upper layers of adjacent areas. They have stopped when they hit structures - such as walls. We can see there are many phases of intercutting and abutting walls, many forming concentric vertical layers like a section through an onion. In among them are the pillars, some are standing free within the enclosed space, others are embedded in the outermost (innermost in terms of the internal space) wall rebuild, but others are embedded in teh walls behind them. I do not know what the excavators make of this, I would guess that one possible interpretation is that this site was been used seasonally and between phases of use the oval structures became a bit dilapidated and had to be repaired, and instead of dismantling them and rebuilding them to save time this was done by adding another layer of wall on the face of the previous one where necessary.

In excavation, the diggers have only exposed the minimum required by the research programme, to begin dismantling the sequence of the walls that we see preserved would be an extremely complicated task (and to my eye impossible without applying single-context recording which I am pretty sure looking at the trenches was not the method used to excavate this so far - more like an adaption of a Kenyon-type technique?). And wisely, the excavators have not attempted this. But they do need to record the exposed surface and amalgamate that with the data on what was removed and what was in that fill (I'd suggest - if that's not what they've done - reverse engineering the record as far as possible into a single-context record).

It seems Jimmy Corsaetti sees here a "pile of stones" (elsewhere he speaks of "stacked stones") that could easily be removed (in one of his rants on X he speaks of his puzzlement that it's enough just to get a "pressure hose" on the site to reveal the pillars and the pictures on them). He simply cannot see (even standing on a walkway looking down directly onto them with an explanatory table by the side) the complex stratigraphy. The many phases of the wall rebuilds are invisible to him.