Klaus Schmidt

Klaus Schmidt (1953-2014) was a German archaeologist and prehistorian. He studied pre- and protohistory, classical archaeology, and geology at the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg. Klaus Schmidt dedicated ten years of his professional career to the excavation and research of Göbekli Tepe. He became a member of Hauptmann's team working at the early Neolithic settlement of Nevali Çori, which proved to be pivotal in Klaus's career. The excavation of Nevali Çori finished in 1991, and it was time for Klaus to set about establishing his own research trajectory. He turned to the records of an extensive survey of sites in south-east Turkey that had been carried out at the beginning of the 1960s although Göbekli Tepe was on the short-list selected from the survey, they chose the site of Çayönü to enable them to investigate the transition from hunting and gathering to the beginnings of farming. Klaus Schmidt set about finding all the Neolithic sites that they had discovered and reported. He was almost uniquely qualified to see what the survey team had not appreciated at the site of Göbekli Tepe. Klaus was able to recognise at once that the large, earthfast stones that he could see on the surface of the mound of Göbekli Tepe could be the tops of such T-shaped pillars. He was able to begin the investigation of Göbekli Tepe in 1994. Klaus accepted invitations to lecture on Göbekli Tepe around the world, and he wrote dozens of reports and articles in Turkish and German but few in English.