Over the last two decades, Göbekli Tepe has stood at the edge of the Neolithic as a bridge to our purportedly male-centered prehistoric past. A closer look at two Göbekli Tepe artifacts may change our understanding of women’s status in prehistory.
By Bernie Taylor | Bernie’s Blog
Social: BlueSky, X, Facebook, YouTube, Academia and ResearchGate
Published – June 2026
One of the key artifacts for this reevaluation can be found in Göbekli Tepe’s so-called “Leopard Pillar Building” where a squatting woman is carved into a stone slab that once stood between two pillars depicting leopards, as pictured below. The German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt (1953-2014), who led the first excavation of Göbekli Tepe in 1995, recognized the Leopard Pillar Building human character as female but, at the same time, considered her to be “graffiti” as she was then the only recognized representation of a woman at the site (Schmidt, K. 2010).
Discussion of the Leopard Pillar Building squatting woman continued infrequently along the same line with the latest version in a 2026 issue of the Cambridge Archaeological Journal where the author argues that the woman is being “…penetrated by a detached penis with the lines possibly denotating the motion of penetration.” This blogger does not see a penis depicted on this artifact and considers the interpretation to be entirely fictional. Questions of human anatomy should be addressed by medical professionals which this blogger has consulted.
Indicating a “detached penis,” real or imaginary, and making the concept a center of discussion for the Göbekli Tepe artifact should not come to a surprise. The common perception among Göbekli Tepe followers is that the site only has male objects. The Neolithic paradigm has also historically been patriarchal.
In the same vein, the German archaeology team’s brilliantly illustrated 2025 scholarly volume Göbekli Tepe: The Imagery of the Pillars in the Monumental Buildings A–D, F and H, includes a chapter with images of the Leopard Pillar Building and the pairs of leopards but the squatting woman is absent from the work.
A more realistic biological interpretation of the Göbekli Tepe engraving is of a squatting woman who is giving birth. Dropping below are her birth tissue and placenta, as pictured above. This new birthing interpretation offers that there was a sacred place within the Göbekli Tepe complex for women. The large number of apparent male human and other animal representations found at Göbekli Tepe do not necessarily determine a male-centered society.
The biological female has her own psychological heroine’s journey through life just as the biological male has his psychological hero’s journey. Each has had its own time and place. The hero’s journey is to cross the threshold of the home and journey into the world. On this sometimes wide-ranging geographical journey, a hero encounters many animals, landscapes as well as inner demons, possibly explaining the large number and diversity of male oriented artifacts at Göbekli Tepe. In contrast, the most significant moment in the heroine’s journey of our past, may have been her, spiritually and physically, giving birth with the assistance of other supportive women.
Göbekli Tepe’s Leopard Pillar Building could have been such a spiritual place for community birthing. The heroine’s journey has changed for most women in modern societies. From this blogger’s personal perspective, we should not look back to Göbekli Tepe as a balanced social model. The Neolithic is in our past.
En Caul Birthing
Another equally intriguing Göbekli Tepe artifact was later brought forth by Klaus Schmidt and his colleague Oliver Dietrich around 2016. The German archaeologists proposed that the 5.1 cm/2-inch statuette pictured above has an erect phallus (Dietrich, O. 2016). The Göbekli Tepe statuette has an animal, most representative of a felid, on one side of the back. The other side of the statuette has been sintered off. We cannot determine if there was a second felid.
This blogger proposes that this Göbekli Tepe statuette is not of a male, but rather of a female whose hair is cropped short, shaven or with a cap. She is giving birth, as indicated by her strained lower body. Another felid would firmly establish an iconographic relationship with the previously discussed squatting woman between the two leopard pillars.
The birthing is mostly likely en caul, whereby the amnionic sac has dropped with the infant inside. En caul births are rare in our modern age, representing 1 in 70,000 births, with most being in spontaneous preterm deliveries. En caul births may have been more common in our prehistoric past with less-than-optimal medical support during pregnancy and birth.
An absence of other female statuettes may be due to their being easily portable and carried with members of the community when they ultimately left the site. The German archaeologists did not designate this statuette as belonging to any specific room. Göbekli Tepe was abandoned, in contrast to the volcanically consumed Pompei where we can find intact relationships between people and their personal belongings. The continued misinterpretations of these two Göbekli Tepe artifacts have been consequential in our understanding of Neolithic Anatolia and perhaps across ancient Greater Mediterranean cultures.
The Great Mother?
The Göbekli Tepe statuette can be compared with the pictured above small statue at Çatalhöyük in prehistoric Anatolia from approximately 8,000 years ago. This Çatalhöyük character is flanked by two felids and more obviously represents a woman with large breasts. Her hair is also short cropped, shaven or with a cap and consistent with the Göbekli Tepe statuette. Most importantly, both have the same en caul birth feature between their calves.
Surveys of Çatalhöyük began in 1958 followed with excavations by the British-Dutch archaeologist James Mellaart. The archeologist believed this sitting woman and other Çatalhöyük artifacts to be of a “goddess” giving birth (Mellaart, J. 1967). Mellaart also hypothesized Çatalhöyük to be matriarchal based on the character of the female artifacts he unearthed. His female-centered connections were controversial in the archaeology community.
A Great Mother concept had recently emerged in psychology and mythology circles, most notably by the depth psychologist Erich Neumann who was heavily influenced by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung (Neumann, E. 1951). The Great Mother concept proposed that throughout history, mythology, religion, and culture, universal unconscious psychological or archetypal forces rather than fixed deities of any single tradition are the source of divine feminine belief systems. The Çatalhöyük archaeological finds and psychological concepts promoted by Neumann appeared to have inextricably become one in the popular media.
The tides turned in Mellaart’s favor via an early 2026 paper published in the journal Science, showing clear matriarchal lines in both the ownership of property and grave goods at Çatalhöyük through DNA from human remains at the site (Yüncü, E. 2025). One could reasonably suggest Göbekli Tepe was matriarchal as well. The iconography, time and space between Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük are not far distant. This finding in Science didn’t prove the Mother Goddess concept for Çatalhöyük.
Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük iconography were continued by the ancient Anatolian Cybele, as pictured above, and following Ephesian Artemis traditions (not pictured). Both were disseminated across the ancient Mediterranean. Areas below the waists of Cybele and the Ephesian Artemis characters are covered and one cannot ascertain if birthing has occured.
The key connecting elements of these female Neolithic and ancient characters are their being flanked by felids. In some cases, the felids are standing next to the goddess and in others on both of her upper arms (not pictured). One could speculate on the many meanings for the felids. Neolithic peoples of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük may have had a different interpretation than the followers of Cybele and the Ephesian Artemis. What they represented in prehistoric times remains a mystery.
Examples of the Great Mother concept do not universally include felids on both sides of her form, evidencing peoples throughout time did not transfer the felid in their unconscious through DNA. This arrangement is a regional Anatolian tradition. The felid iconography would have been passed down from Göbekli Tepe through to the ancient world via mythology and continual re-finding of the artifacts as we have in our present day.
Neolithic divine feminine traditions continued as an undercurrent thru Anatolian conquests by Greco-Roman patriarchal cultures. We today can view shifts from matriarchal to patriarchal societies over ten millennia through their iconographies with the potential rebirth of a female-centered Neolithic paradigm in our examination of prehistory.
Bernie Taylor presents his work at science and humanities conferences as well as being widely interviewed on podcasts.
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References
Dietrich, Oliver and Schmidt, Klaus. 2016. A Short Note on a New Figurine Type from Göbekli Tepe. NEO-LITHICS, The Newsletter of Southwest Asian Neolithic Research, 1/17.
Dietrich, Oliver and Schmidt, Klaus. 2025. Göbekli Tepe: The Imagery of the Pillars in the Monumental Buildings A–D, F and H. Reichert Verlag.
Mellaart, James. 1967. Çatal Höyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. Thames and Hudson Ltd.
Neumann, Erich. 1951. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (German Die große Mutter. Der Archetyp des grossen Weiblichen).
Schmidt, Klaus. 2010. Göbekli Tepe – the Stone Age Sanctuaries. New results of ongoing excavations with a special focus on sculptures and high reliefs. UDK 903.6(560.8)”633\634″>636.01 Documenta Praehistorica XXXVII.
Yüncü, Eren. 2025. et. al. Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük. Science. Vol 388, Issue 6754. DOI: 10.1126/science.adr2915
Yurttaş, Emre Deniz. 2025. A Queer Feminist Perspective on the Early Neolithic Urfa Region: The Ecstatic Agency of the Phallus. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 35, 489–503.
