So Fair a House: Gobekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East

E. B. Banning is an archaeologist, and this peer-reviewed article in Current Anthropology reassesses the widely repeated claim that Gobekli Tepe and comparable Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites were purely ritual temples built by hunter-gatherers with no ordinary domestic use. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed argument engaging directly with the excavated evidence, questioning an interpretation that had become received wisdom in popular accounts faster than the underlying archaeological case had been tested. Its limit is that it is one article proposing a reassessment within an active and still developing scholarly debate, not a final settled consensus, so a claim about Gobekli Tepe's purpose is best framed as contested rather than resolved by this source alone.