Before his death, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt hinted that Gürcütepe — a forgotten hill near Göbekli Tepe — might reveal how humanity evolved from temple builders to settlers, and now new evidence from his notes and recent digs suggests he may have been right, reshaping our entire understanding of where civilization truly began.

Before his sudden death in 2014, German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, the visionary who uncovered Göbekli Tepe, hinted that his greatest discovery might not have been the monumental temple complex that stunned the world — but something buried a few miles away.

He spoke quietly, almost cryptically, about another hill just southeast of Şanlıurfa, Turkey — a place called Gürcütepe.

“If Göbekli Tepe is the temple,” Schmidt once told a colleague, “then Gürcütepe might be the village.

” His notes, later reviewed by his team, revealed sketches, maps, and brief entries dated between 2012 and 2013, describing ongoing test trenches and pottery fragments that seemed to belong to a continuous settlement spanning thousands of years.

While Göbekli Tepe was hailed as the world’s first known temple — a 12,000-year-old sanctuary of towering T-shaped pillars carved with animals and symbols — Gürcütepe told a humbler story.

Beneath its layers, archaeologists found not monuments, but homes, hearths, and tools.

Clay fragments suggested the earliest forms of pottery; grinding stones indicated agriculture.

“This wasn’t a sacred site,” said Dr.Çiğdem Köksal-Schmidt, Klaus’s wife and fellow archaeologist.

“This was where people lived, cooked, built, and buried their dead.

It connects everyday life to the world of the gods.”

Gürcütepe lies only 8 kilometers from Göbekli Tepe, yet the contrast between the two is striking.

Göbekli Tepe’s limestone pillars, some weighing up to 20 tons, were deliberately buried around 8,000 BCE, long before writing or the wheel.

Gürcütepe, however, shows signs of continued habitation well into the Roman period — suggesting a thread of human continuity from the dawn of settled life through classical antiquity.

Satellite imagery and limited excavations in 2021 and 2023 have confirmed that the site spans multiple layers, from the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic to the Iron Age, with tools and bones showing a gradual shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies.

“What we may be looking at,” said Professor Mehmet Özdoğan of Istanbul University, “is not a separate culture, but the missing link — the everyday world that fed and built the monumental Göbekli Tepe.”

According to Schmidt’s unpublished writings, Gürcütepe may have been the domestic counterpart to Göbekli Tepe’s ritual space — a place where the same people who carved the pillars went home, farmed, and raised families.

In his final field diary entry, found after his death, Schmidt wrote: “We have found where they prayed.

Now we must find where they lived.”

But despite its importance, Gürcütepe remains largely unexcavated.

Modern housing and farmland now cover much of the hill, and Turkish authorities have faced challenges in protecting the area from urban expansion.

Local residents occasionally report finding shards, bones, or shaped stones when digging foundations.

“It’s like the past keeps whispering from beneath our feet,” said one farmer from the Gürcütepe district.

The mystery has reignited debates in archaeology.

For decades, scholars believed that religion came after agriculture — that humans settled first, then built temples.

But Göbekli Tepe shattered that idea, showing that organized worship might have preceded farming.

Now Gürcütepe could flip that story again.

If Schmidt was right, civilization may not have been born in sudden bursts of faith or art, but through a gradual blending of both — where the sacred and the mundane coexisted.

Today, international teams from Germany and Turkey are preparing a joint proposal to launch a new excavation phase at Gürcütepe in 2026, using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry to map the subsurface layers.

Funding discussions are ongoing, with the German Archaeological Institute expressing “deep interest in continuing Schmidt’s vision.”

For many who worked alongside Schmidt, this long-delayed exploration feels almost like destiny.

“Klaus always believed we were missing half the picture,” said one of his former students.

“He used to say, ‘Göbekli Tepe shows us what humans worshipped — Gürcütepe will show us why.’”

And perhaps that is the true weight of Gürcütepe — not just as another archaeological site, but as a bridge between myth and memory, a living timeline stretching from the world’s first temples to its first homes.

If the discoveries buried beneath that quiet hill confirm what Schmidt suspected, then humanity’s story — of where civilization truly began — may need to be rewritten once again.