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Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place, and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing archaeologists to reconsider. At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance. The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by something else entirely.

Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have been destinations for pilgrimages

Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.

n the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpo

To Schmidt, the T-shaped pillars are stylized human beings, an idea bolstered by the carved arms that angle from the "shoulders" of some pillars, hands reaching toward their loincloth-draped bellies. The stones face the center of the circle—as at "a meeting or dance," Schmidt says—a representation, perhaps, of a religious ritual. As for the prancing, leaping animals on the figures, he noted that they are mostly deadly creatures: stinging scorpions, charging boars, ferocious lions. The figures represented by the pillars may be guarded by them, or appeasing them, or incorporating them as totems.

nches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and another—a ring of standing pillars.

Geomagnetic surveys in 2003 revealed at least 20 rings piled together, higgledy-piggledy, under the earth.

he pillars were big—the tallest are 18 feet in height and weigh 16 tons. Swarming over their surfaces was a menagerie of animal bas-reliefs, each in a different style, some roughly rendered, a few as refined and symbolic as Byzantine art.

The circles follow a common design. All are made from limestone pillars shaped like giant spikes or capital T's.

They hadn't yet mastered engineering." Knoll speculated that the pillars may have been propped up, perhaps by wooden posts.

Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past.

Puzzle piled upon puzzle as the excavation continued. For reasons yet unknown, the rings at Göbekli Tepe seem to have regularly lost their power, or at least their charm. Every few decades people buried the pillars and put up new stones—a second, smaller ring, inside the first.

he site may have been built, filled in, and built again for centuries.

Bewilderingly, the people at Göbekli Tepe got steadily worse at temple building.

Finally the effort seems to have petered out altogether by 8200 B.C. Göbekli Tepe was all fall and no rise.

so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.

I felt uneasy

He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.

There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.

We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.

Rarely do we mention what we carry

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.

Guns were often a bridge between father and son.

or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.

had a gun put to my head

I can remember that

steel

I can remember

In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.

surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.

I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.

I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.

his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.

I stood there trembling while they apologized.

Jackson County

I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.

hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.

Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.

A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.

centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night

the .308 blew apart the morning.

There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration

Life is sustained by death

the killing is not easy, nor should it be.

would feed me for a year

I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.

He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”

As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,

situation was re

All I could think about was how things might have been different if the

versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.

It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.

Ruger 10/22s and Marlin Model 60s, the .22LRs

There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.

firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.

I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.

they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.

as they wait for the end of the world.

they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E

step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.

None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”

They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.

I understand what’s at stake

I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.

changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.

an unrelenting fear of what could be lost

a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.

He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.

I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban

question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.

Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree

As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier

there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.

ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.

The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.

The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.

I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.

Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.

I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.

I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.

I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.

we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.