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I
next asked if they had found any skeletons. The professor replied with
a smile that they had not, 
but
that the team had not yet dug down to the ground soil. The raised section
around the inside walls of the building is to be excavated this year in
September and may reveal burials. This would enable carbon dating to establish
the date to within a few centuries, and could reveal the site to be as
old as the 11th millennium BC. If this happened it would mean rewriting
the history of the Neolithic Age - otherwise known as the New Stone Age.
Professor Schmidt had more and equally fascinating information about the
site. Apparently all the other hills visible in the vicinity are made
of limestone blocks, but that on which we stood - measuring 300 metres
in diameter - is surmounted by a deep layer of soil carried up here from
the valley below. By what methods had people who had not even discovered
pottery managed to carry millions of cubic metres of soil to this hilltop?
My
second important question was the stage of production that these people
had reached. I felt sure that they must have been an agricultural society,
but Professor Schmidt smiled and assured me that they were certainly hunters
and gatherers, who did not even know how to make pottery. Since no pottery
fragments had been discovered in the area at all, the latter had to be
true, but I had profound doubts about this being a hunting and gathering
culture. I thought for instance of the pyramids of Egypt, whose construction
had required large numbers of workers. The workers had to be fed, which
required a system for the transportation and distribution of food, and
order had to be maintained, which in turn meant soldiers and administrators.
In other words, the construction of a single pyramid presupposed an entire
state system and sophisticated economic structure.