Graham Hancock is brilliant at muddying the waters (saying this as someone who used to read everything he put out - i was enthralled at the mystery of an ancient civilisation that gave birth to all the rest, but nothing over the last 30 years has been substantiated and he loves working the underdog/anti-consensus angle so in my opinion that’s his entire bent, he revels in casting aspersions on well established archeological convention) so I’m not too sure about that, this post suggests it’s still being excavated [0]

Interestingly, there have been some recent excavations that suggest there are some sites that may be even older [1]

[0] https://www.thetravel.com/gobekli-tepe-still-being-excavated... [1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/culture/ancient-site-older-than-gob...

>>"and the Turks refuse to remove any more soil?"

I have no connection to this, but if I was in charge of a site like Gobekli Tepe I would absolutely shut down all work until I was absolutely sure that the people who were going to work on it were a) funded out of the kazzzoo, b) the best people in the world to do it, c) using methods that would not do damage and stop subsequent generations from squeezing more knoweldge than I could imagine from the site. I would want to know exactly what was being looked for and why before I allowed the smallest trowel to scoop the smallest bit of earth off it.

Why? Because if in three years someone popped up and told me that there were a slew of important questions that were now off the agenda because I permitted a world heritage site to be trashed I'd be quite upset frankly.

This is a good and interesting point. It's not like it's decaying while buried - where is the urgency coming from?

Then why ever dig anywhere?

We know there is a great deal buried that will be surprising. That is what real scientists want unearthed. Archaeologists, less so.

The criteria suggested by GP seem like a reasonable starting point.

What do you mean by "real scientists" versus archaeologists?