Larch
Larches are conifers in the genus Larix, of the family Pinaceae. Growing from 20 to 45 m tall, they are native to much of the cooler temperate northern hemisphere, on lowlands in the north and high on mountains further south. Larches are among the dominant plants in the boreal forests of Canada. Although they are conifers, larches are deciduous trees. Larches can reach 50–60 m; the larch's tree crown is sparse and the branches are brought horizontal to the stem if some species have them characteristically pendulous. Larch shoots are dimorphic, with leaves borne singly on long shoots 10–50 centimetres long and bearing several buds, in dense clusters of 20–50 needles on short shoots only 1–2 mm long with only a single bud; the leaves are needle-like. Larches are among the few deciduous conifers, which are evergreen. Other deciduous conifers include the golden larch Pseudolarix amabilis, the dawn redwood Metasequoia glyptostroboides, the Chinese swamp cypress Glyptostrobus pensilis and the bald cypresses in the genus Taxodium.
The male flowers are fall after pollination. The female flowers of larches are erect, small, 1–9 cm long, green or purple, brown in ripening and lignify 5–8 months after pollination; those native to northern regions have small cones with short bracts, with more southerly species tending to have longer cones with exserted bracts, with the longest cones and bracts produced by the southernmost species, in the Himalayas. The seeds are winged; the larches are streamlined trees, the root system are broad and deep and the bark is finely cracked and wrinkled in irregular plaques. The wood is bicolor, with yellowish white sapwood; the chromosome number is 2n = 24, similar to that of most of the other trees of the Pinaceae family. The genus Larix is present in all the temperate-cold zones of the northern hemisphere, from North America to northern Siberia passing through Europe, mountainous China and Japan; the larches are important forest trees of Central Europe, United States and Canada. They require a cool and humid climate and for this reason they are found in the mountains of the temperate zones, while in the northernmost boreal zones ones they are found in the plain.
At gen. Larix belong to the trees that go further north than all, reaching in the North America and Siberia the tundra and polar ice; the larches are pioneer species not demanding towards the soil and they are long-lived trees. They live in pure or mixed forests together with other conifers or more broad-leaved trees. In the past, the cone bract length was used to divide the larches into two sections, but genetic evidence does not support this division, pointing instead to a genetic divide between Old World and New World species, with the cone and bract size being adaptations to climatic conditions. More recent genetic studies have proposed three groups within the genus, with a primary division into North American and Eurasian species, a secondary division of the Eurasian into northern short-bracted species and southern long-bracted species; the genus Larix belongs to the subfamily Laricoideae, which includes the genera Pseudotsuga and Cathaya. There are eleven accepted species of larch subdivided on the basis of the most recent phylogenetic investigations: Larix laricina K. Koch – Tamarack or American larch.
Parts of Alaska and throughout Canada and the northern United States from the eastern Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic shore. Larix lyallii Parl. – Subalpine larch. Mountains of northwest United States and southwest Canada, at high altitude. Larix occidentalis Nutt. – Western larch. Mountains of northwest United States and southwest Canada, at lower altitudes. Larix decidua Mill. – European larch. Mountains of central Europe. Larix sibirica Ledeb. – Siberian larch. Plains of western Siberia. Larix gmelinii Kuzen. – Dahurian larch. Plains of central and eastern Siberia. Larix kaempferi Carr. – Japanese larch. Mountains of central Japan. Larix czekanowskii Szafer – Uncertain, its origin could be hybrid. Larix potaninii Batalin – Chinese larch. Mountains of southwestern China. Larix mastersiana Rehder & E. H. Wilson – Masters' larch. Mountains of western China. Larix griffithii Hook.f. – Himalayan larch. Mountains of the eastern Himalayas. Most if not all of the species can be hybridised in cultivation. Currently-accepted hybrids are: Larix × lubarskii Sukaczev Larix × maritima Sukaczev Larix × polonica Racib.
A well-known hybrid, the Dunkeld larch Larix × marschlinsii, which arose more or less in Switzerland and Scotland when L. decidua and L. kaempferi hybridised when planted together, is still treated as unresolved. Larix x stenophylla Sukaczev. Larch is used as a food plant by the larvae of a number of Lepidoptera species — see list of Lepidoptera that feed on larches. Larches are prone to the fungal canker disease Lachnellula ssp..
National Museum of Denmark
The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen is Denmark’s largest museum of cultural history, comprising the histories of Danish and foreign cultures, alike. The museum's main building is located a short distance from Strøget at the center of Copenhagen, it contains exhibits from Greenland to South America. Additionally, the museum sponsors SILA - The Greenland Research Center at the National Museum of Denmark to further archaeological and anthropological research in Greenland; the museum has a number of national commitments within the following key areas: archaeology, numismatics, natural science, communication, building antiquarian activities in connection with the churches of Denmark, as well as the handling of the Danefæ. The museum covers 14,000 years of Danish history, from the reindeer-hunters of the Ice Age and works of religious art from the Middle Ages, when the church was significant in Danish life. Danish coins from Viking times to the present and coins from ancient Rome and Greece, as well as examples of the coinage and currencies of other cultures, are exhibited also.
The National Museum keeps Denmark’s largest and most varied collection of objects from the ancient cultures of Greece and Italy, the Near East and Egypt. For example, it holds a collection of objects that were retrieved during the Danish excavation of Tell Shemshara in Iraq in 1957. Exhibits are shown on who the Danish people are and were, stories of everyday life and special occasions, stories of the Danish state and nation, but most of all stories of different people’s lives in Denmark from 1560 to 2000; the Danish pre-history section was re-opened in May 2008 after years of renovating. In 2013, a major exhibition on the Vikings was opened by Queen Margrethe, it has toured including the British Museum in London. Golden horns of Gallehus Gundestrup cauldron Egtved Girl coffin Kingittorsuaq Runestone Snoldelev Stone Trundholm Sun Chariot Seikilos epitaph Nolder weapons Holmegaard bow Tjele helmet fragment Christian Jürgensen Thomsen Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae Sophus Müller Olaf Olsen Steen Hvass Carsten U. Larsen Per Kristian Madsen Rane Willerslev Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark is the title of the museum's yearbook, published since 1928 and contains articles and other contributions.
ISSN 0084-9308 Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark 1807 - 2007. København: Nationalmuseet, 2007 ISBN 978-87-7602-079-8 Dankirke Danish Museum of the History of Music Frihedsmuseet Frilandsmuseet Frøslev Liselund Manor Lille Mølle, Christianshavn Rømø List of museums in Denmark Official website
Moscow
Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits, 17 million within the urban area and 20 million within the metropolitan area. Moscow is one of Russia's federal cities. Moscow is the major political, economic and scientific center of Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as the largest city on the European continent. By broader definitions, Moscow is among the world's largest cities, being the 14th largest metro area, the 18th largest agglomeration, the 14th largest urban area, the 11th largest by population within city limits worldwide. According to Forbes 2013, Moscow has been ranked as the ninth most expensive city in the world by Mercer and has one of the world's largest urban economies, being ranked as an alpha global city according to the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, is one of the fastest growing tourist destinations in the world according to the MasterCard Global Destination Cities Index. Moscow is the coldest megacity on Earth.
It is home to the Ostankino Tower, the tallest free standing structure in Europe. By its territorial expansion on July 1, 2012 southwest into the Moscow Oblast, the area of the capital more than doubled, going from 1,091 to 2,511 square kilometers, resulting in Moscow becoming the largest city on the European continent by area. Moscow is situated on the Moskva River in the Central Federal District of European Russia, making it Europe's most populated inland city; the city is well known for its architecture its historic buildings such as Saint Basil's Cathedral with its colorful architectural style. With over 40 percent of its territory covered by greenery, it is one of the greenest capitals and major cities in Europe and the world, having the largest forest in an urban area within its borders—more than any other major city—even before its expansion in 2012; the city has served as the capital of a progression of states, from the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow and the subsequent Tsardom of Russia to the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union and the contemporary Russian Federation.
Moscow is a seat of power of the Government of Russia, being the site of the Moscow Kremlin, a medieval city-fortress, today the residence for work of the President of Russia. The Moscow Kremlin and Red Square are one of several World Heritage Sites in the city. Both chambers of the Russian parliament sit in the city. Moscow is considered the center of Russian culture, having served as the home of Russian artists and sports figures and because of the presence of museums and political institutions and theatres; the city is served by a transit network, which includes four international airports, nine railway terminals, numerous trams, a monorail system and one of the deepest underground rapid transit systems in the world, the Moscow Metro, the fourth-largest in the world and largest outside Asia in terms of passenger numbers, the busiest in Europe. It is recognized as one of the city's landmarks due to the rich architecture of its 200 stations. Moscow has acquired a number of epithets, most referring to its size and preeminent status within the nation: The Third Rome, the Whitestone One, the First Throne, the Forty Soroks.
Moscow is one of the twelve Hero Cities. The demonym for a Moscow resident is "москвич" for male or "москвичка" for female, rendered in English as Muscovite; the name "Moscow" is abbreviated "MSK". The name of the city is thought to be derived from the name of the Moskva River. There have been proposed several theories of the origin of the name of the river. Finno-Ugric Merya and Muroma people, who were among the several Early Eastern Slavic tribes which inhabited the area, called the river Mustajoki, it has been suggested. The most linguistically well grounded and accepted is from the Proto-Balto-Slavic root *mŭzg-/muzg- from the Proto-Indo-European *meu- "wet", so the name Moskva might signify a river at a wetland or a marsh, its cognates include Russian: музга, muzga "pool, puddle", Lithuanian: mazgoti and Latvian: mazgāt "to wash", Sanskrit: májjati "to drown", Latin: mergō "to dip, immerse". In many Slavic countries Moskov is a surname, most common in Bulgaria, Russia and North Macedonia. There exist as well similar place names in Poland like Mozgawa.
The original Old Russian form of the name is reconstructed as *Москы, *Mosky, hence it was one of a few Slavic ū-stem nouns. As with other nouns of that declension, it had been undergoing a morphological transformation at the early stage of the development of the language, as a result the first written mentions in the 12th century were Московь, Moskovĭ, Москви, Moskvi, Москвe/Москвѣ, Moskve/Moskvě. From the latter forms came the modern Russian name Москва, a result of morphological generalisation with the numerous Slavic ā-stem nouns. However, the form Moskovĭ has left some traces in many other languages, such as English: Moscow, German: Moskau, French: Moscou, Georgian: მოსკოვი, Latvian: Maskava, Ottoman Turkish: Moskov, Tatar: Мәскәү, Mäskäw, Kazakh: Мәскеу, Mäskew, Chuvash: Мускав, etc. In a similar manner the Latin name Moscovia has been formed it became a collo
Ice age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth is in the Quaternary glaciation, known in popular terminology as the Ice Age. Individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods", intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials", with both climatic pulses part of the Quaternary or other periods in Earth's history. In the terminology of glaciology, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in both northern and southern hemispheres. By this definition, we are in an interglacial period—the Holocene; the amount of heat trapping gases emitted into Earth's Oceans and atmosphere will prevent the next ice age, which otherwise would begin in around 50,000 years, more glacial cycles. In 1742, Pierre Martel, an engineer and geographer living in Geneva, visited the valley of Chamonix in the Alps of Savoy. Two years he published an account of his journey.
He reported that the inhabitants of that valley attributed the dispersal of erratic boulders to the glaciers, saying that they had once extended much farther. Similar explanations were reported from other regions of the Alps. In 1815 the carpenter and chamois hunter Jean-Pierre Perraudin explained erratic boulders in the Val de Bagnes in the Swiss canton of Valais as being due to glaciers extending further. An unknown woodcutter from Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland advocated a similar idea in a discussion with the Swiss-German geologist Jean de Charpentier in 1834. Comparable explanations are known from the Val de Ferret in the Valais and the Seeland in western Switzerland and in Goethe's scientific work; such explanations could be found in other parts of the world. When the Bavarian naturalist Ernst von Bibra visited the Chilean Andes in 1849–1850, the natives attributed fossil moraines to the former action of glaciers. Meanwhile, European scholars had begun to wonder. From the middle of the 18th century, some discussed ice as a means of transport.
The Swedish mining expert Daniel Tilas was, in 1742, the first person to suggest drifting sea ice in order to explain the presence of erratic boulders in the Scandinavian and Baltic regions. In 1795, the Scottish philosopher and gentleman naturalist, James Hutton, explained erratic boulders in the Alps by the action of glaciers. Two decades in 1818, the Swedish botanist Göran Wahlenberg published his theory of a glaciation of the Scandinavian peninsula, he regarded glaciation as a regional phenomenon. Only a few years the Danish-Norwegian geologist Jens Esmark argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations, he attempted to show. During the following years, Esmark's ideas were discussed and taken over in parts by Swedish and German scientists. At the University of Edinburgh Robert Jameson seemed to be open to Esmark's ideas, as reviewed by Norwegian professor of glaciology Bjørn G. Andersen. Jameson's remarks about ancient glaciers in Scotland were most prompted by Esmark.
In Germany, Albrecht Reinhard Bernhardi, a geologist and professor of forestry at an academy in Dreissigacker, since incorporated in the southern Thuringian city of Meiningen, adopted Esmark's theory. In a paper published in 1832, Bernhardi speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones of the globe. In 1829, independently of these debates, the Swiss civil engineer Ignaz Venetz explained the dispersal of erratic boulders in the Alps, the nearby Jura Mountains, the North German Plain as being due to huge glaciers; when he read his paper before the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, most scientists remained sceptical. Venetz convinced his friend Jean de Charpentier. De Charpentier transformed Venetz's idea into a theory with a glaciation limited to the Alps, his thoughts resembled Wahlenberg's theory. In fact, both men shared the same volcanistic, or in de Charpentier's case rather plutonistic assumptions, about the Earth's history. In 1834, de Charpentier presented his paper before the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft.
In the meantime, the German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper was studying mosses which were growing on erratic boulders in the alpine upland of Bavaria. He began to wonder. During the summer of 1835 he made some excursions to the Bavarian Alps. Schimper came to the conclusion that ice must have been the means of transport for the boulders in the alpine upland. In the winter of 1835 to 1836 he held. Schimper assumed that there must have been global times of obliteration with a cold climate and frozen water. Schimper spent the summer months of 1836 at Devens, near Bex, in the Swiss Alps with his former university friend Louis Agassiz and Jean de Charpentier. Schimper, de Charpentier and Venetz convinced Agassiz that there had been a time of glaciation. During the winter of 1836/37, Agassiz and Schimper developed the theory of a sequence of glaciations, they drew upon the preceding works of Venetz, de Charpentier and on their own fieldwork. Agassiz appears to have been familiar with Bernhardi's paper at that time.
At the beginning of 1837, Schimper coined the term "ice age" for the period of the glaciers. In July 1837 Ag
Yekaterinburg
Yekaterinburg, alternatively romanised Ekaterinburg, is the fourth-largest city in Russia and the administrative centre of Sverdlovsk Oblast, located on the Iset River east of the Ural Mountains, in the middle of the Eurasian continent, on the Asian side of the boundary between Asia and Europe. It is the main industrial centre of the oblast. In 2017, it had an estimated population of 1,488,791. Yekaterinburg has been dubbed the "third capital of Russia", as it is ranked third by the size of economy, culture and tourism, it is located about 1,420 kilometres to the east of Moscow. Yekaterinburg was founded on 18 November 1723 and named after the Russian emperor Peter the Great's wife, who after his death became Catherine I, Yekaterina being the Russian form of her name; the city served as the mining capital of the Russian Empire as well as a strategic connection between Europe and Asia at the time. In 1781, Catherine the Great gave Yekaterinburg the status of a district town of Perm Province, built the main road of the Empire, the Siberian Route, through the city.
Yekaterinburg became a key city to Siberia, which had rich resources, was known as the "window to Asia", a reference to Saint Petersburg as a "window to Europe". In the late 19th century, Yekaterinburg became one of the centres of revolutionary movements in the Urals. In 1924, after Russia became a socialist state, the city was named Sverdlovsk after the Bolshevik leader Yakov Sverdlov. During the Soviet era, Sverdlovsk was turned into an administrative powerhouse. In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the city returned to its historical name. Yekaterinburg is one of the most important economic centres in Russia, the city had experienced economic and population growth recently; some of the tallest buildings in Russia are located in the city. In the land now occupied by Yekaterinburg, there have been settlements of people since ancient times; the earliest of the ancient settlements dated back to 8000–7000 BC during the Mesolithic Period. In the area of Isetskoe Pravoberezhnoye I, a settlement dating back to 6000–5000 BC in the Neolithic Period, stone processing workshops were found with artefacts such as grinding plates, clumps of rock and finished products.
According to the analysis of artefacts, the inhabitants of the settlement used over 50 different rocks and minerals to make tools, which indicates a good knowledge of the population of that time of the region's natural resources. On the peninsula Gamayun, there are archaeological monuments dating back to the Chalcolithic Period: in the upper part there were found workshops for the production of stone tools, in the lower part – a settlement of two dwellings belonging to the Ayat people. In this area traces of his stay left the population of the Koptyak people, dating back to 2000 BC, while on the monument of Tent I were found the only traces of burials of this culture in the Urals. In the Bronze Age, the Gamayun people lived in the area, leaving behind fragments of ceramics, ornaments. Archaeological artefacts in the vicinity of Yekaterinburg were discovered for the first time at the end of the 19th century in an area being constructed for a railway. Excavations and research took place starting from the 20th century.
The artefacts are kept in museums such as the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, the Hermitage, the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences. Russian historian Vasily Tatishchev and Russian engineer Georg Wilhelm de Gennin founded Yekaterinburg with the construction of a massive iron-making plant under the decree of Russian emperor Peter the Great in 1723, they named the city after the emperor's wife, who became empress regnant Catherine I. The official date of the city's foundation is 18 November 1723, when the shops carried out a test run of the bloomery for trip hammers; the plant was commissioned on 24 November 6 days with its size and technical equipment exceeding all metallurgical enterprises not only in the country, but in the world. It was granted town status in 1796; the city was one of Russia's first industrial cities, prompted at the start of the 18th century by decrees from the Tsar requiring the development in Yekaterinburg of metalworking industries.
The city was built, with extensive use of iron, to a regular square plan with iron works and residential buildings at the centre. These were surrounded by fortified walls, so that Yekaterinburg was at the same time both a manufacturing centre and a fortress at the frontier between Europe and Asia, it therefore found itself at the heart of Russia's strategy for further development of the entire Ural region. The so-called Siberian Route became operational in 1763 and placed the city on an important transit route, which led to its development as a focus of trade and commerce between east and west, gave rise to the description of the city as the "window to Asia". With the growth in trade and the city's administrative importance, the ironworks became less critical, the more important buildings were built using expensive stone. Small manufacturing and trading businesses proliferated. In 1781 Russia's empress, Catherine the Great, nominated the city as the administrative centre for the wider region.
Following the October Revolution, the family of deposed Tsar Nicholas II were sent to internal exile in Yekaterinburg where they were imprisoned in the Ipatiev House in the city. In July 1918, the Czechoslovak Legions were closing on Yekaterinburg. In the early hours of the morning of 17 July, the deposed Tsar, his wife Alexandra, their
Lascaux
Lascaux is the setting of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior ceilings of the cave; the paintings represent large animals, typical local and contemporary fauna that correspond with the fossil record of the Upper Paleolithic time. The drawings are the combined effort of many generations, with continued debate, the age of the paintings is estimated at around 17,000 years. Lascaux was inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979, as element of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley. On September 12, 1940, the entrance to the Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat when his dog fell in a hole. Ravidat returned to the scene with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, Simon Coencas, they entered the cave through a 15 metres deep shaft that they believed might be a legendary secret passage to the nearby Lascaux Manor. The teenagers discovered.
Galleries that suggest continuity, context or represent a cavern were given names. Those include the Hall of the Bulls, the Passageway, the Shaft, the Nave, the Apse, the Chamber of Felines, they returned along with the Abbé Henri Breuil on the 21st September 1940. Breuil was accompanied by Jean Bouyssonie and Dr Cheynier; the cave complex was opened to the public on July 14, 1948, initial archaeological investigations began a year focusing on the Shaft. By 1955, carbon dioxide, heat and other contaminants produced by 1,200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings; as air condition deteriorated and lichen infested the walls. The cave was closed to the public in 1963, the paintings were restored to their original state, a monitoring system on a daily basis was introduced. Lascaux II, an exact copy of the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery was displayed at the Grand Palais in Paris, before being displayed from 1983 in the cave's vicinity, a compromise and attempt to present an impression of the paintings' scale and composition for the public without harming the originals.
A full range of Lascaux's parietal art is presented a few kilometres from the site at the Centre of Prehistoric Art, Le Parc du Thot, where there are live animals representing ice-age fauna. The paintings for this site were duplicated with the same type of materials as iron oxide and ochre which were believed to be used 19 thousand years ago. Other facsimiles of Lascaux have been produced over the years. Part of the cave has been recreated around a unique set of five exact replicas of the Nave and the Shaft and is displayed in various museums around the world. Lascaux IV is a new copy that forms part of the International Centre for Parietal Art and integrates digital technology into the display. In May 2018 Ochroconis lascauxensis, a species of fungus of the Ascomycota phylum, was described and named after the place of its first emergence and isolation, the Lascaux cave; this followed on from the discovery of another related species Ochroconis anomala, first observed inside the cave in 2000.
The following year black spots began to appear among the cave paintings. No official announcement on the effect and/or progress of attempted treatments has been made; as of 2008, the cave contained black mold. In January 2008, authorities closed the cave for three months to scientists and preservationists. A single individual was allowed to enter the cave for 20 minutes once a week to monitor climatic conditions. Now only a few scientific experts are allowed to work inside the cave and just for a few days a month but the efforts to remove the mold have taken a toll, leaving dark patches and damaging the pigments on the walls. In 2009 it was announced: Mold problem "stable". In 2011 the fungus seemed to be in retreat after the introduction of an additional stricter conservation program. Two research programs have been instigated at the CIAP concerning how to best treat the problem, the cave now possesses a powerful climatisation system designed to reduce the introduction of bacteria. In its sedimentary composition, the Vézère drainage basin covers one fourth of the département of the Dordogne, the northernmost region of the Black Périgord.
Before joining the Dordogne River near Limeuil, the Vézère flows in a south-westerly direction. At its centre point, the river's course is marked by a series of meanders flanked by high limestone cliffs that determine the landscape. Upstream from this steep-sloped relief, near Montignac and in the vicinity of Lascaux, the contours of the land soften considerably; the Lascaux valley is located some distance from the major concentrations of decorated caves and inhabited sites, most of which were discovered further downstream. In the environs of the village of Eyzies-de-Tayac Sireuil, there are no fewer than 37 decorated caves and shelters, as well as an greater number of habitation sites from the Upper Paleolithic, located in the open, beneath a sheltering overhang, or at the entrance to one of the area's karst cavities; this is the highest concentration in western Europe. T
Göbekli Tepe
Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological site in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey 12 km northeast of the city of Şanlıurfa. The tell is about 300 m in diameter, it is 760 m above sea level. The tell includes two phases of use, believed to be of a social or ritual nature by site discoverer and excavator Klaus Schmidt, dating back to the 10th–8th millennium BCE. During the first phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars were erected – the world's oldest known megaliths. More than 200 pillars in about 20 circles are known through geophysical surveys; each pillar weighs up to 10 tons. They are fitted into sockets. In the second phase, belonging to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, the erected pillars are smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime; the site was abandoned after the PPNB. Younger structures date to classical times; the details of the structure's function remain a mystery. It was excavated by a German archaeological team under the direction of Schmidt from 1996 until his death in 2014.
In 2018, the site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. The site was first noted in a survey conducted by Istanbul University and the University of Chicago in 1963. American archaeologist Peter Benedict identified lithics collected from the surface of the site as belonging to the Aceramic Neolithic, but mistook stone slabs for grave markers, postulating that the prehistoric phase was overlain by a Byzantine cemetery; the hill had long been under agricultural cultivation, generations of local inhabitants had moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles, which may have disturbed the upper layers of the site. At some point attempts had been made to break up some of the pillars by farmers who mistook them for ordinary large rocks. In 1994, Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, working at Nevalı Çori, was looking for another site to excavate, he reviewed the archaeological literature on the surrounding area, found the 1963 Chicago researchers’ brief description of Göbekli Tepe, decided to reexamine the site.
Having found similar structures at Nevalı Çori, he recognized the possibility that the rocks and slabs were prehistoric. The following year, he began excavating there in collaboration with the Şanlıurfa Museum, soon unearthed the first of the huge T-shaped pillars; the imposing stratigraphy of Göbekli Tepe attests to many centuries of activity, beginning at least as early as the Epipaleolithic period. Structures identified with the succeeding period, Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, have been dated to the 10th millennium BCE. Remains of smaller buildings identified as Pre-Pottery Neolithic B and dating from the 9th millennium BCE have been unearthed. A number of radiocarbon dates have been published: The Hd samples are from charcoal in the fill of the lowest levels of the site and would date the end of the active phase of occupation of Level III - the actual structures will be older; the Ua samples come from pedogenic carbonate coatings on pillars and only indicate the time after the site was abandoned—the terminus ante quem.
Göbekli Tepe is with buildings fanning in all directions. In the north, the plateau is connected to a neighbouring mountain range by a narrow promontory. In all other directions, the ridge descends steeply into steep cliffs. On top of the ridge there is considerable evidence of human impact, in addition to the construction of the tell. Excavations have taken place at the southern slope of the tell and west of a mulberry that marks an Islamic pilgrimage, but archaeological finds come from the entire plateau; the team has found many remains of tools. The plateau has been transformed by erosion and by quarrying, which took place not only in the Neolithic, but in classical times. There are four 10-metre-long and 20-centimetre-wide channels on the southern part of the plateau, interpreted as the remains of an ancient quarry from which rectangular blocks were taken; these are related to a square building in the neighbourhood, of which only the foundation is preserved. This is the remains of a Roman watchtower that belonged to the Limes Arabicus, this is conjecture.
Most structures on the plateau seem to be the result of Neolithic quarrying, with the quarries being used as sources for the huge, monolithic architectural elements. Their profiles were pecked into the rock, with the detached blocks levered out of the rock bank. Several quarries where round workpieces had been produced were identified, their status as quarries was confirmed by the find of a 3-by-3-metre piece at the southeastern slope of the plateau. Unequivocally Neolithic are three T-shaped pillars; the largest of them lies on the northern plateau. It has a length of 7 m and its head has a width of 3 m, its weight may be around 50 tons. The two other unfinished pillars lie on the southern Plateau. At the western edge of the hill, a lionlike figure was found. In this area and limestone fragments occur more frequently, it was therefore suggested. It is unclear, on the other hand, how to classify three phallic depictions from the surface of the southern plateau, they are near the quarries of classical times.
Apart from the tell, there is an incised platform with two sockets that could have held pillars, a
