How The US Is Driving The Rise Of The Businessmen-Politician
John P. Ruehl – Independent Media Institute
08-31-2026 ~ The ultrawealthy have always influenced politics, but the Trump administration has brought them directly into policymaking. The phenomenon is already global, creating new channels of influence within and between states.
As his superyacht Boardwalk docked in Venice as part of the “Freedom 250 Coastal Diplomacy Italy initiative” in July, billionaire US Ambassador Tilman J. Fertitta was greeted by protests. Fertitta was traveling across the country to meet “with local business leaders, celebrities and Americans on board the yacht,” according to CNN. The incident captured a growing trend of ultrawealthy business figures in positions of political power.
Fertitta is one of several billionaire US ambassadors, alongside those serving in the UK, Turkey, France and Monaco, and the Organization of American States. Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff and outside adviser Jared Kushner are also billionaires, along with Trump’s commerce secretary, education secretary, interior secretary, head of NASA, and administrator of the small business administration.
The Trump administration includes 57 cabinet members and senior officials with net worths of more than $100 million, according to El País. A more informal integration of billionaires into diplomacy was seen during Trump’s May 2026 visit to China. More than a dozen CEOs and senior executives, including BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, joined the US delegation.
Businessmen have long been prominent in local American politics. A 2021 study by political scientist Patricia A. Kirkland of more than 3,200 mayors in 263 cities found that nearly a third of mayors have either been business owners or have executive experience, making it the most common prior profession. But Trump’s second term has brought the ultrawealthy into government at a rapid, top-down scale, believing that their experience building companies, managing organizations, and negotiating deals makes them better equipped than established politicians dependent on outside funding.
The ongoing billionaire-politician surge has tapped into a wider anti-establishment mood in the country, and the shrinking of the permanent bureaucracy under DOGE has further elevated political appointees and outside advisers.
But it is neither a new American phenomenon nor confined to the United States. More than 11 percent of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office, according to a 2023 study in Perspectives on Politics, spanning various government systems. The trend is reshaping international relations as governments adapt to this change.
The Rise and Return of the Politician Businessman
Businessmen were just one of many professions who entered politics in early America, alongside lawyers, landowners, veterans, and merchants. But industrialization allowed some to build enormous fortunes through railroads, manufacturing, banking, and natural resources. Compared with Europe’s more aristocratic systems, American industrialists increasingly found opportunities to buy their way into political power.
By the early 20th century, several businessmen had reached Washington’s inner circles; banking and industrial magnate Andrew Mellon became Treasury secretary in 1921, while banker Jesse H. Jones chaired the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and later became commerce secretary. During World War II, hundreds of executives entered the government as “dollar-a-year-men” to help manage war efforts, including General Motors president William S. Knudsen.
Their direct political influence hit a wall after WWII, as military veterans came to dominate political office. A 1956 Timearticle noted businessmen’s declining involvement, quoting an industrialist who complained that “the same old warhorses” remained dominant in both parties. Lawyers, though in slow decline, also remained powerful, making up 60 percent of Congress in 1960, while a variety of staffers, campaign officials, policy advisers, and career bureaucrats emerged as another growing political class.
By the end of the 20th century, however, billionaires were again testing the limits of how far wealth could take them. Ross Perot’s presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996 showed that personal fortunes could propel businessmen onto the national stage, helping inspire Trump’s first presidential run in 2000. Michael Bloomberg’s successful run for New York City mayor in 2002, where he served until 2013, showed that the GOP could embrace the model, with others like Bill Haslam demonstrating its reach into state government as he became the governor of Tennessee (2011–2019).
Trump’s 2016 victory accelerated the trend. His appointment of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state in 2017 signaled that corporate experience was treated as a governing asset, while billionaire businessman Robert Johnson was appointed ambassador to the UK.
Democrats embraced the billionaire politician model, too. Mark Dayton became senator for Minnesota in 2001 and later served as its governor between 2011 and 2019. Bloomberg (now a Democrat) and Tom Steyer both sought the presidential nomination in 2020, while J.B. Pritzker has served as Illinois’ governor since 2019.
The growing overlap between business and political figures has greatly influenced geopolitics. Major technology, finance, energy, and defense firms close to the White House also operate global infrastructure and supply chains that foreign governments depend on. Elon Musk’s Starlink, for example, is essential to Ukraine’s war effort.
The Trump administration’s decision to own major stakes in private companies has further tied corporate interests more closely to US policy, raising questions about how this new fusion of business and government will affect Washington’s dealings abroad, as other countries manage their own class of politicians with vast wealth. Read more
Zuckerberg May Finally Pay A Price For Preying On Our Children
Sonali Kolhatkar – Photo: sonalikolhatkar.com
08-29-2026 ~ Massive state and federal lawsuits take Meta to task over widespread harm to children.
As a mother of two children who has often been on the losing side of family battles against screen time, I’ve been closely monitoring New Mexico’s landmark lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. State Attorney General Raúl Torrez took the company to task to protect children “from sexual abuse, online solicitation, and human trafficking.”
I was thrilled to learn that Torrez won penalties totaling nearly a billion dollars over the company’s inadequate warnings to parents about the harms of its product and the resulting impacts of constant social media consumption on children’s mental health.
The New Mexico lawsuit is “groundbreaking and also an affirmation of what many families have been experiencing and concerned about with Instagram for years,” said Haley Hinkle, policy counsel for Fairplay, a nonprofit working to protect children from marketing and predatory digital practices.
She explained that “the public nuisance claims are the first we’ve seen across the country where a state is saying, in general, ‘You have created a burden on families, on our resources, our education system, [and] our health system, in the way that you have treated children.’”
Digital screens are everywhere, and children’s brains are particularly vulnerable to the sophisticated algorithmic delivery of content on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms.
Capitalist responses to children’s digital consumption place the onus of regulating exposure squarely on parents. In addition to navigating a world where sugary drinks and processed foods seduce young taste buds, gun violence lurks near and within schools, and fossil fuel companies jeopardize children’s future, social media addiction is yet another source of parental anxiety.
“What we hear many parents saying, including parents we advocate alongside who lost their children to social media harms, is that this really isn’t a fair fight,” said Hinkle.
Despite the US Surgeon General’s warnings about social media’s disturbing impacts on young people—from eating disorders to suicidal ideation—and federal regulations such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), social media companies like Meta have refused to place adequate guardrails to protect children.
“Meta and many other big tech platforms are designed to maximize engagement at all costs,” explained Hinkle. “What that really means is maximizing time and attention, how many clicks kids make on platforms, and how long they spend there. That’s really valuable to social media companies because they can show more ads the longer that a child or adult is on the platform.”
“The more a child does when they’re online, the more data they generate that allows them to be targeted to get more direct ads and targeted to spend more time,” said Hinkle. She called it a “vicious cycle that has been, in many ways, at odds with kids’ health and well-being.”
When public schools began rolling out laptops for classroom use in the early 2000s, I was horrified even as others were of the opinion that preparing children for the digital age was in everyone’s best interest. Today, schools across the country are admitting their overreliance on digital learning was a mistake and are starting to reverse the misguided trend. For my children and others who spent their formative learning years staring at screens, this mea culpa comes too late.
On top of school screens, kids and parents have to contend with the tantalizing pull of social media feeds, just so Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his investors can extract greater profits from children’s constant online engagement. Read more
Why We Need To Elect More Workers To Public Office
Roxanne D. Brown ~ Photo: USW.org
08-29-2026 ~ It’s the only way to build a government for ordinary Americans.
Ryan Kominakis opened his energy bill several months ago and decided on the spot to run for state representative in Indiana’s 4th District.
He saw his bill double virtually overnight because of exorbitant rate increases, which ultimately forced some financially strapped consumers to turn off the lights, lower the thermostat, and shiver through the winter.
That kind of indignity proved to be the final straw. Ryan, a section griever with United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1066 at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, long ago tired of watching the state’s corporate-friendly leaders give huge tax breaks to the wealthy while ordinary families struggled to make ends meet.
He realized what’s becoming clearer and clearer to working people. We have to elect more of our own to public office if we want a government that works for us.
“I still work 12-hour shifts and swing shifts on the shop floor,” Ryan said, highlighting the credentials setting him apart from his opponent, a 20-year incumbent and former airline industry vice president who once referred to members of the public as “noise boxes.”
It isn’t just the budget-busting energy bills pushing families to the margins, observed Ryan, a crane operator and Marine veteran of Afghanistan.
“Gas prices, food prices, childcare—they all cost more,” he said. Yet, he points out, his opponent ignores these struggles and “legislates like a corporate executive,” even threatening to derail a town’s funding after the mayor criticized the skyrocketing utility bills.
This is what happens when the privileged elbow their way into office to serve themselves and others of their ilk, throwing everyone else under the bus.
It’s so pervasive that many of us no longer have true representation, according to a 2024 study from Duke University and Loyola University Chicago that showed how thoroughly the rich have wormed their way into power and how urgently we need to reclaim it.
About half of the US workforce is made up of mechanics, glassmakers, autoworkers, miners, steelworkers, other manufacturing workers and so on. Yet less than 2 percent of state lawmakers across the country hailed from working-class backgrounds as of 2023, the researchers determined.
Just 116 of the 7,300 lawmakers in the study “currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical or labor union jobs.” In 10 states, the researchers found not a single lawmaker with a real, working person’s job.
It’s the same story with Congress and the Trump administration, both bloated with career politicians, ideologues, tycoons, corporate lawyers and others who neither grasp nor care about the day-to-day struggles of ordinary Americans.
Nothing underscores the chasm between haves and have-nots like US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent shrugging off the nation’s rampant inequality. Bessent, a hedge fund founder with a net worth of about $600 million, recently declared that he was “sick of hearing” about the crisis and claimed it no longer existed.
Working people, especially union leaders like Ryan, never hide from a problem or try to wish it away. They face a challenge head-on and get the job done, delivering results because their paychecks, their families, and their very lives in dangerous workplaces depend on it.
Ryan, who’s worked as a crew leader and safety advocate, looks after his coworkers. The same concern for others also fuels his civic involvement, including volunteer work with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, an organization of fellow combat veterans facing the same kinds of challenges that he does.
It’s the kind of mindset—the kind of skillset—ideal for public office.
“You know how to be a leader,” Ryan said of his union activism. “When you work with management, that’s kind of like reaching across the aisle, working with the other side.”
The data backs him up.
Union workers advocate more strongly for working people, both while campaigning and after election to public office, than nonunion peers, according to a study released in March by Jacobin, the Center for Working Class Politics, and Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy.
Union members also use their leadership skills to build bridges in the government arena. They convert their experience in the trenches into credibility in the halls of power. And they win voters’ trust in ways that drive turnout at the polls, the researchers concluded.
As Ryan decided in running for the Indiana legislature, there’s only one way to ensure working people get the government we deserve.
We have to build it with our own hands.
By Roxanne D. Brown
Author Bio: Roxanne D. Brown is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).
Credit Line: This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
Remains At Home
08-28-2026 ~ Why Residential Burial?
Through burial practice, it is believed that the living create, affirm, and transform social relationships with those who have passed. Interring the dead in settlements, sometimes even below house floors, makes ancestors enduring participants in daily life. Residential burial practices establish continuity between generations, anchor memory in place, and inscribe kinship, power, inheritance, and ritual within spaces where the living are situated. Residential burials do not mark biological death as an end to social bonds but indicate their reconfiguration, tying households and communities to both histories and futures in the making. Why, then, do some people bury their dead in or near residences and others do not? How can ethnography guide or obscure our interpretation of these intimate contexts in the archaeological record? These questions formed the starting point for our inquiry into residential burial on a global scale, in the ethnographic and archaeological records.
To address these questions, we used information from 60 ethnographically documented cultures in the Probability Sample Files in the electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) World Cultures database. The aim was to examine residential burial practices across these cases. However, given the limited occurrence of residential burial in the 60 case studies, we soon realized that the ethnographic record did not mirror patterns familiar to archaeologists. Ethnographic descriptions tend to highlight changes in burial practice, often linked with the spread of monotheistic religions. As a result, our questions and interests shifted to how a systematic cross-cultural study of residential burial based on the ethnographic record compared to the archaeological record.
We then asked whether an archaeological sample would differ significantly from the ethnographic sample. The coding of residential burial in 49 cultures formed part of a simple random sample from eHRAF Archaeology. A comparison of these two datasets revealed that residential burials were more prevalent in archaeological than in ethnographic contexts. These findings have important implications for using ethnographic analogy when the aim is to understand mortuary (or other related) practices in the archaeological record.
While ethnographic descriptions can help us understand reasons for change in mortuary placement, the ethnographic record does not fully capture the more frequent occurrence of residential burial, which is apparent in the archaeological record. Therefore, instead of the more conventional use of ethnographic analogy for archaeological interpretation (i.e., formulating hypotheses), our study illustrates how archaeological insights can be used in conjunction with ethnography to develop and test sociocultural theories of permanent residence, kinship, and social structure. The ethnographic studies in our dataset, which derive mainly from the 20th century, have only a small percentage of cases with residential burials. The more frequent occurrence of this practice in archaeological samples indicates that the archaeological record represents a broader array of different burial behavior than those represented in the ethnographic record. While contemporary people rarely bury ancestors at home, in the past, houses, huts, and settlements were much more often spaces where both the living and the dead coexisted—and felt at home.
As we reported in American Antiquity, from which this article is excerpted, we first discuss how traditions of funerary placement can be used to model social organization and reflect diachronic changes. Then, we discuss the role of ethnographic analogy in archaeological explanation and present results from the two datasets on residential burial, based on 60 ethnographic and 49 archaeological cases. These cases suggest a decline in residential burial at different points in the past while also highlighting a more recent global shift away from this practice. These findings underscore the value of archaeological evidence, which can illuminate a diversity of burial practices that have decreased significantly in the ethnographic present but not fully disappeared. Our results have implications not only for our understanding of cross-cultural burial patterns and how they changed in response to other societal changes but also (more generally) for how archaeologists employ ethnographic data and analogy when interpreting the archaeological record.
Why Are Burials So Important?
Funerary practice is ideal for cross-cultural, anthropological studies that combine ethnographic and archaeological data. It is visible and broadly recorded in both research databases. These ritual practices document how social organizations are created and materialized. Burial is a socially and emotionally dramatic moment in individual life cycles—a moment of making, showing, and reaffirming relationships. Arguably, funerary rituals establish kinship between the living and the dead and the memory of the event, while the spatial placement of the dead and the physical markers (memorials) help those kinship relationships to endure. A combination of emotion, social ceremony, and reaffirmation, funerary practices are critical to institutional formation.
Moreover, the relationship between settlement continuity and intramural interments aligns with the view of other scholars who suggest that residential burial does not merely tie the living to their ancestors but also links them to a dwelling and the land it sits on. In many contexts, connections were affirmed and reaffirmed through the sequential reuse of mortuary contexts and ritual activities conducted adjacent to them.
Necrogeography
The use of the dead to structure, mark, and reinforce the taskscapes of the living has been an integral aspect of both prehuman and human practices for thousands of years. The spatial relationship between the living and the dead can, however, also become a matter of political intervention. In the late 19th-century Ghanaian Gold Coast, colonial British law was revised six times to mandate and enforce the transition from residential interments to community cemeteries. Moving the resting place for ancestors to locations outside the house has implications beyond the spiritual: “the colonial state enforced cemetery burial because they realized Gold Coast people would never sell their land if it contained the remains of their elders; cemeteries were therefore a crucial tool in the transformation of land into private property for state dispossession,” stated a 2022 article published in the Journal of Social History. Consequentially, the movement of the deceased to community cemeteries led to changes in interpersonal networks and community relationships with the supernatural, their ancestors, and property. Even after some converted to Christianity, colonial-era Ghanaians initially resisted moving burial locations. Funerary customs can be a core extension of personal identity and connection to places, so they are not easy to change. Although the factors and circumstances that prompted householders to shift their funerary practices and reposition their ancestors outside their houses varied from one historical case to another, the behavioral ramifications in most contexts likely extended well beyond the spiritual to social networks and material possessions.
This connection between burial location and broader social organization has long been explored in anthropological and archaeological studies of kinship and descent groups. In particular, cross-cultural research suggests that formal cemeteries frequently emerge where corporate groups use burial places to legitimize claims to land and resources. However, kinship studies have a long history in anthropology with particular salience for British social anthropologists who examined variability in structural forms governing broader social practices. Implicit in understanding kinship is that the organization it implies is essential to group and individual operations and survival. The British social anthropology approach was fundamentally that of social science, looking for systematic patterning affecting group reproduction. Although criticized for the functionalist logic of the social body, the approach can and should be reconceptualized as social networks in which active participants form kinship through blood or other means as well as break kinship ties for historical and strategic goals. This is captured by the concept of kinship-making that recognizes dynamic ways in which different individuals, households, and larger social networks can coexist and evolve. Read more
Trump’s Brazen Crypto Bank Scheme May Be His Sleaziest Yet
C.J. Polychroniou
08-20-2026 ~ Donald Trump is poised to become the first US president to approve and operate his own bank.
Donald Trump’s rise to power, especially during his second term in office, has changed the political culture of the United States.
He is using the presidency as an instrument for the enrichment of himself and his family that has in fact no precedent in U.S. history. Trump is running the government like a mafia boss.
He has managed to defy accountability by destroying or marginalizing institutions that would rein in his executive power, and in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office.
Enter Trump’s crypto business dealings as a case in point, from which the president made more than $1 billion last year.
In a move that makes even Vito Corleone look like an amateur, a regulator appointed by the president himself has granted the Trump family-backed crypto firm World Liberty Financial preliminary approval to function as a bank. Sen. Elizabeth Warren commented after the approval: “President Trump is now the first president in history to approve, operate, and supervise his own bank. This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen — and Congress cannot allow it to stand.”
This is one of the sleaziest acts of conduct by a sitting president of the United States. But the fact that it happened without overwhelming pushback from the populace also speaks volumes about the thorough and wide-ranging transformation of U.S. political life during Trump’s second presidency.
Ironically, Trump had previously expressed that he was not a fan of cryptocurrencies. In June 2021, during an interview with Fox Business Network, he described Bitcoin as a scam and even suggested that cryptocurrencies posed an actual threat to the status of the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency. In another interview with the same network that year, he said that crypto was “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.”
But The Donald was never one to hold values of any kind. With him, money is everything — nothing else really matters. So, he reversed course on cryptocurrencies during his 2024 presidential campaign when he became convinced by executives in the industry that there was a fortune to be made by investing in crypto and recognized that cryptocurrencies can move value quickly and easily across borders. Of course, Trump also flipped on crypto when he realized that these companies were huge corporate donors to that year’s elections.
In 2024, Trump and his sons — along with special envoy Steve Witkoff and his own sons — had helped co-found World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business that is trading publicly. The Trump family owns 38 percent of World Liberty. An investment firm in the United Arab Emirates owns nearly half of World Liberty, according to a Wall Street Journal report published in January 2026. Yet the Trump family collects 75 percent of all of the crypto revenues. The mafia don always gets the lion’s share from all undertakings conducted by the lower tiers of the organization.
World Liberty was established during the height of the 2024 presidential campaign so Donald Trump could join as a private citizen. Still, World Liberty employed those connections as part of its branding to raise funds by letting everyone know that the company was linked to Trump.
In January 2025, a few days before his second inauguration, Trump launched a meme cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, which netted him hundreds of millions of dollars. Unsurprisingly, with no guardrails between presidency and personal profits, Trump collected nearly $800 million in 2025 from World Liberty’s sales of its own digital tokens. Incidentally, digital tokens have zero intrinsic value and their prices are driven purely by speculation. They are digital “tulips.” This development was seen by many as a new phase in the monetization of the presidency.
Cryptocurrency, mind you, is not a traditional currency and doesn’t have legal tender status. But it is a powerful tool for criminal activity. Needless to say, World Liberty won’t run like a traditional bank. There will be no checking accounts or loan applications. It will issue and manage its own stablecoins (digital tokens whose values are pegged to the U.S. dollar), known as USD1. Its main function will likely be to legitimize institutional graft, especially since U.S. federal regulators have taken a hands-off approach to crypto oversight. From now on, corporate entities or governments from around the world seeking access to the Trump administration can route huge sums of money through World Liberty digital tokens.
Indeed, another characteristic of cryptocurrencies is that they make foreign political interference easier — and far right leaders seem to be especially drawn to them. In the U.K., Nigel Farage, leader of the far right Reform Party, received more than 5 million British pounds from a cryptocurrency billionaire, who lives in Thailand, without declaring it. Argentina’s far right President Javier Milei was accused of being involved in a transnational crypto fraud scheme in which thousands of token-holders saw their investments, to the tune of 250 million U.S. dollars, being wiped out. Naturally, both Farage and Milei have denied any wrongdoing. However, Farage is still being investigated, while Milei faced calls for impeachment.
In the U.S., Donald Trump, the king of crypto and the sleaziest of global far right leaders, has seen the future of digital finance and loves it. This is why the Trump crypto company World Liberty Financial applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter. It’s the ultimate vehicle for the Trump family’s naked self-enrichment.
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Source: https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-brazen-crypto-bank-scheme-may-be-his-sleaziest-yet/
C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a columnist for Global Policy Journal and a regular contributor to Truthout. He has published scores of books, including Marxist Perspectives on Imperialism: A Theoretical Analysis; Perspectives and Issues in International Political Economy (ed.); and Socialism: Crisis and Renewal (ed.), and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021); Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2023); and A Livable Future Is Possible: Confronting the Threats to Our Survival (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2024).
Is Türkiye’s Megalithic Archaeological Site Göbeklitepe A Temple?
Erdem Denk – Professor Ankara University – Department of International Relations – Picture: ResearchGate
08-17-2026 ~ While shooting a documentary at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different historical interpretations of the site. An international group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast the T-shaped pillars as traces of humanity’s mystical past. Representatives of an NGO working with conservative Turkish people in Germany likened the pillars’ posture to movements in Islamic prayer. A retired pharmacist insisted that ancient kings had used the site enclosures for astronomical divination. Even the visitor center offered a strongly mystical welcome. Amid this profusion of viewpoints, the material evidence received remarkably little attention.
This intense engagement invites an ambivalent response: should we welcome the considerable public interest, or question the frameworks through which the site is perceived? Much of Göbeklitepe’s popularity can be traced to German news magazine Der Spiegel’s 2006 cover story, which advanced archaeologist Klaus Schmidt’s description of the site as the “world’s first temple,” alongside speculation linking it to the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve. Meanwhile, the claims by pseudoscientists linking the site to extraterrestrials—as Swiss author Erich von Däniken and his present-day successors remind us—have always found a substantial audience.
But was Göbeklitepe really a temple? More importantly, does it show that religion was the primary force driving humanity toward settled life? Expecting definitive answers about societies without written records may be impossible, but does that make every interpretation equally valid? How did the “temple” interpretation gain factual authority while those questioning it were left to shoulder the burden of proof?
Through this article, I examine five possible arguments for why Göbeklitepe is considered a religious site, with condensed formulations of ideas that have circulated through archaeological scholarship, popular media, and the site’s public presentation:
1. Its monumental structures stood alone in the middle of nowhere, without a nearby water source or surrounding domestic buildings, and were periodically visited by people traveling up to 200 kilometers; they must therefore have been temples forming a pilgrimage center.
The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.
For decades, excavations at Göbeklitepe concentrated on the large circular structures, guided by the assertion that they lacked domestic context for their existence. Karahantepe and Sayburç, excavated more holistically as settlements, instead revealed large circular structures embedded within inhabited spaces. As research at Göbeklitepe has expanded and previously excavated areas have been reassessed, a similar pattern has emerged: monumental structures were embedded within a broader inhabited settlement.
Dwellings do not, of course, exclude ritual activity. But ritual served many purposes in deep prehistory. They could accompany initiation, birth, death, and burial, communal consumption, dispute resolution, social transitions, and the renewal of collective identity. Ritual is therefore not synonymous with religion, and such activity hardly proves that the space was devoted exclusively to worship.
Nor did the circles simply stand above an empty landscape as monuments designed to impress distant onlookers. They were carved directly into the bedrock below ground level, and the growing evidence that they were roofed would have further limited their external visibility. Their “monumentality” was therefore experienced largely from within, weakening the image of conspicuous landmarks built to dominate the landscape and draw pilgrims from afar.
The surrounding structures have yielded food remains, grinding stones, mortars, pestles, and other traces of everyday life. Although fragmentary and scattered, human remains are consistent with sustained occupation of the site, while water management features indicate the deliberate exploitation of local water resources. In October 2025, georadar, geomagnetic, and lidar surveys conducted across previously unexplored parts of the mound identified numerous structures interpreted as possible dwellings—despite decades of confident claims to the contrary, they had been lying there all along.
In short, even if people traveled considerable distances to Göbeklitepe, they were not approaching a solitary monument rising from an empty landscape. The large circular structures formed part of an inhabited settlement landscape.
2. With their T-shaped pillars, elaborate reliefs, wall niches, and polished terrazzo floors, the large circular structures were architecturally unique and distinct from ordinary domestic buildings. They must therefore have been sacred spaces.
Not necessarily.
The central circles are certainly impressive in scale—but unique? Not quite. Excavations at Karahantepe, Sayburç, and Göbeklitepe increasingly show that T-shaped pillars and large circular architecture were part of a shared regional vocabulary and not an isolated anomaly.
Smaller T-shaped pillars also appear in structures interpreted as dwellings, where they seem to have served practical architectural purposes, including roof support. In the circular structures, this functional form was enlarged and transformed into a richly symbolic one, particularly through animal imagery. This indicates symbolic meanings and collective functions extending beyond those associated with an individual dwelling; however, these functions cannot be identified as religious on their own.
Although generally less elaborate and lacking the carefully finished floors of the central circles, dwellings share features such as wall niches, stone-building techniques, and spatial arrangements. The difference lies in scale, investment, ornamentation, and social importance, and not in a wholly distinct architectural vocabulary. The argument therefore fails twice: uniqueness would not by itself prove that these structures were temples—and their architecture was not unique in the first place. Read more