Hungry architecture: spaces of consumption and predation at Göbekli Tepe

The subject of this paper is a social ontological approach to the site of Göbekli Tepe in south-east Anatolia. It is argued that modern Cartesian concepts and dichotomous archaeological frameworks are inadequate tools with which to understand and articulate people's realities, past and present. Consequently, archaeological interpretation is reconfigured on the basis of indigenous theory and recent theoretical developments in anthropology, which provide ways to rethink relations beyond the conceptual confines of the dominant Western ontology. Indeed, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic world appears to be one that was fundamentally relational, predicated on engagements between potentially agential human, non-human and material entities. Through careful attention to the iconography, human and animal remains, and the phenomenal dimensions of the architecture, it becomes apparent that relations at Göbekli Tepe were founded on the socio-cosmic principles of consumption, predation and co-production.