An icebreaker
Hunter-gatherers carved and raised massive stone pillars about 11,500 years ago, before farming or writing. It is real archaeology whose own interpretation keeps being revised — wrapped in far more speculative claims than the dig itself supports.
He led excavation of the site from 1995 until his death in 2014 and argued it was a ritual gathering place built by hunter-gatherers, not a settlement. He summarized the find as evidence that organized religion came before farming and cities, not after.
Taking over field research after the previous director’s death, he pushed back on calling the site a temple, arguing the word carries assumptions the evidence doesn’t support. He and colleagues point to signs of everyday habitation that complicate the earlier picture of a purely ritual site.
In 2017 he and a colleague published a paper arguing that the animal carvings on one pillar map to constellations and record a comet strike near the start of the Younger Dryas. Other researchers call the mapping too subjective to confirm, and it remains unproven.
He argues the site was built with help from survivors of an advanced civilization destroyed by a comet at the end of the last ice age. Mainstream archaeologists reject this claim, saying it isn’t supported by the excavated evidence.
In a widely watched 2024 debate, he argued that an advanced civilization would have left the traces archaeologists routinely find — crops, tools, waste — and that none turn up at the site or anywhere else from that age.