IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 244

On a limestone plateau about fifteen kilometres north-east of the city of Şanlıurfa, in south-eastern Turkey, stands a low, rounded hill. The people who live nearby call it Göbekli Tepe, usually translated as 'potbelly hill', a name suggested by the shape of the rise. For most of the twentieth century it was simply farmland, where occasional pieces of worked flint and broken slabs of limestone came to the surface and were thought to be of no importance. A joint Turkish and American survey team that visited the hill in 1963 noted the flint tools but took the broken slabs for medieval gravestones, and the site attracted little further interest.

Nothing further happened for more than three decades. Then, in 1994, the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt read the old survey report while working at another site in the region. Schmidt had spent years excavating Nevalı Çori, a settlement of roughly the same period. That site now lies beneath the reservoir of the Atatürk Dam, and the description of the hill matched what he had found there. He visited Göbekli Tepe, recognised the broken slabs as pieces of large T-shaped pillars, and began digging the following year on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute.

The excavations revealed something that no one had expected. Beneath a thin layer of soil lay a series of roughly circular enclosures, built one above another over many centuries. Each was formed by walls of massive limestone pillars, most of them T-shaped, with a plain shaft for the body and a wider block forming the head. The largest stand about five and a half metres high and weigh as much as ten tonnes, and every circle has a pair of taller pillars at its centre, set facing one another. The stone was not carried from a distance: unfinished pillars still lie in the quarries on the plateau itself, some of them still attached to the bedrock.

Almost every pillar carries some decoration. Cut into the broad faces in low relief are foxes, boars, snakes, scorpions, cranes and aurochs, together with abstract patterns of lines and crescents. There are a few human figures as well, and on one pillar a carving that has been read as a headless body surrounded by vultures. The animals are not arranged as a single scene; each is placed separately, often as though falling or crouching. Because metal was not yet worked in the region, all of this was cut with stone tools.

Radiocarbon measurements place the construction of the oldest enclosures in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, roughly between 9500 and 8000 BCE, which makes them about eleven thousand years old. That dating is what gives the site its importance. The people who built the circles were not farmers living in a village: they were hunter-gatherers who had no pottery, no metal and no domestic animals apart from the dog. They hunted wild game and collected wild plants, and yet they quarried, moved and carved hundreds of tonnes of stone.

The enclosures were not left open. Each, it appears, was eventually filled with rubble and debris, sometimes including broken pieces of pillar and quantities of animal bone. Schmidt was convinced that the filling was deliberate, part of the way the site was used: a circle was buried when it went out of use, and a new one was built, often slightly smaller, on top of it. The oldest circles, with their enormous pillars, therefore lie deepest, while the later ones, with thinner pillars and simpler carving, lie nearer the surface.

Schmidt drew a large conclusion from this. Since the nineteenth century, scholars had assumed that monumental building came after farming: people first settled, produced a surplus of food and only then had the time and the organisation to raise temples. Göbekli Tepe appeared to reverse the order, for here were enormous structures built by people who did not farm. Schmidt argued that the site was above all a ceremonial centre, and that the wish to gather at such places may itself have encouraged people to settle and, in time, to cultivate plants. The idea was memorable and has been repeated ever since, though many specialists regard it as unproven, since no direct evidence survives of what took place inside the circles.

Schmidt held that the circles were not ordinary houses, and few signs of daily life were found inside them. More recent excavation around the enclosures, however, has uncovered cisterns, grinding stones and smaller buildings, suggesting that some people also lived on the hill. The thousands of animal bones in the fill, mostly of wild species, have been read as the remains of feasts that accompanied the building work or the ceremonies held there.

Only a small part of the hill has been examined. Estimates of the excavated fraction vary, but all are below a tenth, and geophysical surveys suggest that many more enclosures remain underground. Schmidt died in 2014, since when excavation and research have continued under other archaeologists, and in 2018 the site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Work elsewhere in the region has changed the picture further. Surveys have identified a number of hills with similar pillars and similar dates, among them Karahan Tepe, about forty kilometres away. Göbekli Tepe, it now seems, was not a solitary experiment but one of several places where people of the same period gathered to build. Whether those places were temples, meeting places, or something for which there is no modern equivalent, remains an open question.

For much of the twentieth century, historians of technology assumed that ironworking reached Africa from outside. Iron was first smelted in Anatolia and the Levant, and the knowledge travelled south with traders from Carthage or up the Nile from Meroë. The assumption was not unreasonable, because physical evidence is hard to read. Iron rusts away, so tools and weapons seldom survive; furnaces were often demolished and rebuilt; and the smiths left little behind except the waste from their fires.

Smelting is a chemical process. Iron in its ores is combined with oxygen, and the smith's task is to strip that oxygen away. Charcoal, burned in a restricted supply of air, produces carbon monoxide, which removes oxygen from the ore. Temperatures of about 1,100 to 1,200 degrees Celsius are required, but they are deliberately kept below the point at which iron melts, around 1,538 degrees. The metal therefore never becomes liquid. Instead it collects as a spongy, semi-solid mass known as a bloom, mixed with the glassy waste called slag.

The bloom is then reheated and hammered, again and again, to drive out the trapped slag and weld the iron into a solid bar, which can be forged into a tool or weapon. Building the furnace, smelting the ore and working the metal were often done by the same people. In many African societies these activities were surrounded by rules, taboos and ritual, the furnace sometimes being treated as a living thing that gave birth to the iron inside it. Smiths were feared as well as respected, since they controlled a material that no household could make for itself.

The furnaces took several forms. The simplest was a shallow pit lined with clay, into which ore and charcoal were packed and air blown through a tube. More elaborate were the tall clay shafts built above ground, some of them several metres high, which could hold more ore and reach higher temperatures. Air was supplied by bellows, usually of goatskin, and passed into the furnace through clay pipes known as tuyères. In parts of West Africa, smelters dispensed with bellows altogether and built towers with tuyères at the base, drawing air in by natural draught so that the furnace itself created the current.

Recognising such a furnace after the event is not easy. What usually survives is a scatter of slag, fragments of tuyère and lumps of burnt clay, together with excavated pits, which can be dated by radiocarbon in the charcoal they contain. Slag is the most durable trace. It is dense, it does not corrode, and its composition can show how hot the furnace ran and how much of the iron was recovered; in some regions it was tapped out molten and cooled into great blocks that still litter the ground. Slag can mislead as well. At Meroë, in the Nile Valley, enormous slag heaps were long taken as proof of a great iron industry, and recent excavation has confirmed that smelting there was large in scale; but the heaps built up over many centuries, so they cannot show how much was produced in any single period.

Dating these remains is the hardest part. Charcoal chosen for radiocarbon measurement may come from a long-dead tree, giving too early a result, while later disturbance can introduce material that is too young. A furnace may have been used many times over a long period. Some early dates are therefore contested. In the Termit massif of Niger, claims for smelting in the second millennium BCE rest on a small number of samples, and other archaeologists have argued that the earliest secure dates there are several centuries later.

The best-known evidence comes from central Nigeria. In the 1960s Bernard Fagg excavated sites of the Nok culture and found iron-smelting furnaces beside the terracotta figures for which that culture is famous. Nok ironworking has since been dated to the middle of the first millennium BCE, and some researchers have argued for an earlier beginning. The Nok material remains central to the case for very early iron smelting south of the Sahara.

Farther south, near Lake Victoria, researchers working with the Haya people studied furnaces that appeared to preheat the air blown into them, and reported that the metal produced contained enough carbon to count as steel. The claim attracted great attention, since it implied sophisticated furnace design two thousand years ago. It has also been challenged: critics have questioned whether the air really was preheated and whether the dates obtained could be relied on.

Written documents are scarce, and reconstruction depends on other evidence for most of the continent. Arab geographers described iron exported from East African ports, and European travellers in the nineteenth century watched smelting and recorded the ritual. Linguists have traced related words for iron, smith and furnace across the Bantu languages, suggesting that the technology spread with farming communities. Oral traditions, finally, preserve accounts of smiths who were both respected and feared, and who in some societies formed a separate group into which marriage was discouraged.

None of this settles the largest question. Ironworking may have been invented independently in more than one part of Africa, or arrived from the north and spread quickly. Much of the continent has never been excavated, and a single well-dated furnace could change the argument. For the moment the evidence points to several centres of innovation rather than a single origin, and to a technology adapted to local materials rather than simply copied.

A small Roman brooch, green with corrosion, comes up under a spade on a Lincolnshire farm. Within a year it may be in a museum case, in a dealer's window in London, in a private collection in Texas, or simply lost. What should happen to such objects, and who should own them, is now one of archaeology's sharpest arguments. The disagreement is not really about whether collectors love the past. It is about what an object is worth once it has been taken out of the ground.

The case for a free market is easily stated. Collectors argue that they are the last line of defence for objects that would otherwise be destroyed: fields are ploughed, sites are dug, and an object in a private cabinet at least survives. They point out that many of the world's great museums were built on private collections, and that wealthy benefactors have funded galleries and conservation before leaving their possessions to the public. Dealers add that a legal trade is safer than a secret one: if finds are sold openly they will be reported, and their information recorded.

Users of metal detectors make a similar argument from experience. In England and Wales a voluntary scheme allows anyone who finds an archaeological object to report it to a local officer, who identifies and records it while the finder keeps it. The scheme now holds records of well over a million objects, many of which would otherwise have vanished unrecorded. Detectorists maintain that this cooperation is possible only because they are not compelled, and that a law requiring surrender of every find would simply teach people to keep quiet.

Archaeologists reply that this misunderstands what an object is. A brooch in a museum case is a brooch; a brooch in the ground, with its pin, its position in a grave, the remains of a cloak and the bones of its wearer, is evidence. Remove it and the evidence is destroyed for ever. A coin in a field may mark a Roman road or a market; a scatter of pottery may show where a building stood. Once soil is disturbed without a record, the site can never be reconstructed, and the loss falls not on the owner of the field but on everyone who might have learned from it.

The damage is not confined to the objects themselves. Wherever antiquities are valuable, sites are dug at night. In England this is called nighthawking, including on protected monuments and private land; in parts of the Mediterranean, Middle East and Southeast Asia, organised looting has been linked to the funding of armed groups. ICOM, the international council of museums, publishes lists of the categories of object most at risk so that dealers and customs officers can recognise them.

Governments have responded in two very different ways. Many countries treat antiquities as national property: objects of a certain age or importance belong to the state, may not be exported without a licence and must be reported when found. The 1970 UNESCO convention, now signed by most countries, commits members to control the movement of cultural property and return stolen items. The hope was that a strict law would dry up the market. In practice, where the law is strict and the police are few, it has often driven the trade underground instead.

England and Wales chose regulation. The Treasure Act 1996 defines certain finds, including most objects of gold or silver and hoards of coins, as Treasure. A finder must report them, a museum has the right to buy them, and the payment is shared between finder and landowner. The results can be spectacular: in 2009 a metal-detector user found a hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver in a field in Staffordshire, the largest ever found, and after a public appeal it went to two museums in the Midlands. The arrangement is not elegant, but it has produced both knowledge and public collections.

Yet the same system allowed a Roman cavalry helmet, found in fragments in Cumbria in 2010, to be sold at auction to a private buyer when a museum failed to raise the money in time. The helmet has since been lent for exhibition, but it remains in private hands, and what happens to it next is unknown. This is the weakness of every compromise. The law can ensure that an object is recorded; it cannot ensure that the record is ever studied, or that the object is still available to scholars a generation later.

My own view is that the sale of antiquities should be tolerated but tightly controlled. The arguments for private ownership are real, and a total prohibition would punish the honest finder while leaving the criminal untouched. But two conditions must hold. Nothing should be sold without a record of where it was found, made at the time of discovery by someone competent to make it. And museums, which hold material in trust for the public, should not buy objects whose history cannot be traced.

The past is not a commodity like any other. A private owner may care for an object beautifully for fifty years, and then the collection is dispersed, the labels are lost and the context has gone. What cannot be replaced is not the brooch but the knowledge of where it lay, and that knowledge belongs to no one and to everyone at once.