From Symbol to Function — A Relational-Ecological Method for Reading Animal Imagery and Architecture in the Early Neolithic
Dawn Littlefield — 2026-08-12
From Symbol to Function
A Relational-Ecological Method for Reading Animal Imagery and Architecture in the Early Neolithic
Dawn Littlefield
The Forgotten Language of Living Worlds Research Project
Abstract
Ancient animal imagery is commonly approached through questions of representation: What deity does this animal symbolize? Which clan did it identify? Does it represent hunting, death, fertility, danger, ancestry, cosmology, or ritual?
This paper proposes adding another question before fixing symbolic meaning:
What does the represented organism actually do within a living system, and what relationship is that capacity performing in the archaeological composition?
Using Göbekli Tepe as the primary case and comparing evidence from the wider early Neolithic world of southeastern Anatolia, this paper develops a relational-ecological method in which the analytical unit is not the isolated symbol but:
organism + ecological behavior + placement + direction + neighboring motifs + architectural role + wider system
The method does not assume that an animal possesses one universal symbolic meaning, nor that later mythological traditions descend directly from the Neolithic. Instead, it tests whether ecological capacities—sensing, adaptation, disturbance, orientation, predation, scavenging, boundary regulation, transformation and continuity—contribute explanatory power when analyzed alongside architectural and spatial relationships.
Göbekli Tepe provides an unusually rich test because its anthropomorphic T-shaped pillars, paired monumental centers, differentiated animal repertoires, directional compositions and planned enclosure geometry make relationships materially visible. Published archaeological research already demonstrates that animal species vary systematically among enclosures, that imagery frequently has centripetal orientation, that animals are represented in motion, and that several monumental structures were geometrically coordinated.
The argument advanced here is methodological rather than decipherment-based:
Ancient imagery may sometimes preserve ecological and relational instruction as well as identity, narrative or cosmology.
The question is therefore not only what an ancient image represented.
It is what relationship the image was helping the architecture perform.
1. From Symbol to Function
Archaeology necessarily works through fragments.
Stone survives where voice does not.
Images survive where explanation does not.
A vulture remains carved into limestone after the person who understood why it belonged there has been dead for eleven thousand years.
The natural temptation is to turn the surviving animal into a noun:
vulture = death
snake = danger
fox = clan
boar = power
But living organisms are not nouns.
They are processes.
A vulture does something.
A serpent does something.
A fox does something.
A boar does something.
And what they do is not arbitrary. Their behavioral and ecological strategies existed before humans carved them into stone.
This paper therefore begins with a methodological reversal:
Motifs should sometimes be tested as verbs before being interpreted as nouns.
Instead of beginning exclusively with:
What does the animal stand for?
we also ask:
What does the animal sense?
How does it move?
What does it protect?
What does it transform?
What boundaries does it cross?
What happens to an ecosystem when it is present?
What happens when it disappears?
This does not replace conventional archaeological interpretation.
An animal may simultaneously participate in group identity, ritual narrative, ancestry, cosmology, fear, memory and ecological knowledge.
The proposed method adds another dimension:
Functional valence.
The animal may carry significance partly because humans repeatedly encountered its way of being in the world.
This possibility is especially relevant to hunter-forager and early sedentary communities whose survival required extraordinarily detailed observation of animal behavior, seasonal movement, landscape, predation, weather, plants and water.
The method therefore follows four rules:
Observation before interpretation.
Function before fixed symbolic identity.
Relationship before isolation.
Reality corrects the model.
An interpretation strengthens when it predicts placement, association or recurrence that can be independently observed.
It weakens when the proposed function has to be repeatedly changed to rescue the hypothesis.
2. Göbekli Tepe as a Relational Test Case
Göbekli Tepe is unusually well suited to this method because meaning is not distributed randomly across loose objects.
It is architecturally organized.
Its early monumental buildings contain T-shaped limestone pillars set around interior spaces, with major enclosures B, C and D organized around pairs of larger freestanding central pillars. Enclosure D's central pillars rise approximately 5.5 metres and display arms, hands, belts and garments, making their anthropomorphic character especially clear. Smaller T-pillars occur around the perimeter. Similar paired anthropomorphic T-pillars appear at Nevalı Çori, indicating that the architectural grammar extended beyond one site.
This already forces us to consider relationships among at least five levels:
animal image
→ pillar
→ central pair
→ enclosure
→ larger architectural complex
Haklay and Gopher's geometric analysis found that Enclosures B, C and D were not simply three unrelated circular buildings. Their centers form a coherent geometric arrangement, and the authors argue that the structures were probably initially conceived as a single architectural project.
Meaning therefore may reside not only on the pillar.
It may reside between pillars.
Between center and perimeter.
Between one enclosure and another.
This is important because contemporary relational interpretations of Göbekli Tepe are already moving in this direction. Busacca's analysis emphasizes the spatial and performative contexts of the imagery and describes the enclosures as places of encounter among human and non-human agents. He identifies centripetal orientation, movement and three-dimensionality as significant aspects of the visual system.
More recent research likewise emphasizes relationships between humans, animals, architecture, boundaries, danger, life and death rather than treating every animal as an isolated emblem.
The present method builds on that relational turn but asks a further question:
Do the actual ecological capacities of the represented organisms help explain their relational placement?
That question is testable.
3. Animal Imagery as Compressed Ecological Intelligence
The proposal is not that every animal possessed one universal prehistoric definition.
Quite the opposite.
Different landscapes provide different biological teachers.
The relevant invariant, if one exists, is more likely to be function than species.
A deer may carry an early-warning capacity in one ecosystem.
A gazelle may carry it elsewhere.
A crane may provide orientation and seasonal-return information in one landscape.
A seabird may perform that informational role somewhere else.
The animal changes.
The relationship persists.
This is why the method distinguishes ecological behavior from symbolic translation.
Consider several recurrent animals at Göbekli Tepe.
Serpent — sensing, threshold and transformation
Snakes are among the most frequent animal depictions at Göbekli Tepe and are especially prominent in Enclosure A. They occur on pillars, stone plaquettes and other carved objects.
Ecologically, snakes combine several striking capacities:
ground-vibration sensitivity,
movement through narrow spaces,
close contact with surfaces and cavities,
ambush and defensive precision,
periodic shedding.
These observations do not demonstrate that a Neolithic serpent “meant transformation.”
They provide a functional field to test:
sensing → constrained movement → threshold crossing → renewal/change
The archaeological question is then whether serpent imagery disproportionately occurs in positions involving boundaries, directional movement, lower registers or transitional relationships.
That prediction can fail.
If snake placement is unrelated to any of those functions, the functional interpretation weakens.
Fox — adaptation and edge intelligence
Fox imagery dominates Enclosure B; both central pillars bear large fox depictions.
Foxes are opportunistic generalists. They exploit ecological edges, change routes, alter diets and survive under variable environmental conditions.
The functional field is therefore:
orientation → adaptation → rerouting
Again, this is not a translation.
It is a prediction-generating ecological observation.
Boar — disturbance and reorganization
Boars dominate the imagery of Enclosure C. Excavation reports note both prominent boar reliefs and deposited boar sculptures.
Boars do something ecologically different from foxes.
They root.
They disturb ground.
They open surfaces.
They redistribute soil.
They can defend themselves with extraordinary force.
This suggests a functional field of:
disturb → open → defend → reorganize
The distinction matters.
“Power” would flatten fox, boar, aurochs and feline into the same category.
Ecology differentiates them.
Birds — orientation, transport and crossing
Bird imagery plays an especially important role in Enclosure D. Pillar 56 in Enclosure H provides a particularly useful composition: cranes and duck-like birds occur above snakes, a bucranium is flanked by two snakes, and another snake curls downward.
Birds occupy domains humans cannot continuously inhabit.
Many migrate.
They carry seasonal information over distance.
Water birds move among terrestrial, aquatic and aerial environments.
Their functional field therefore includes:
orientation → cross domains → carry → return
This becomes testable when combined with register and direction.
Do aerial animals tend to occupy upper zones?
Do crawling animals occur lower?
Do birds disproportionately participate in scenes involving crossing, death or transfer?
The method asks.
It does not assume.
Vulture — continuity through death
Pillar 43 includes a large vulture alongside a snake, wildfowl, H-shaped motifs, a large scorpion, another bird and a headless human figure. The excavation team itself treats the composition as potentially narrative rather than as an arbitrary accumulation of separate animals.
A vulture does not simply “symbolize death.”
Ecologically, it participates in what happens after death.
Carrion is consumed.
Matter re-enters food webs.
Disease risk can be reduced.
Death becomes circulation.
This produces a different question:
Is the vulture functioning as an image of death, or as an agent in a process by which death becomes continuity?
Those interpretations are not mutually exclusive.
The second simply restores the organism's actual ecological behavior to the analysis.
4. Differentiated Enclosures: Animals as Capacities
One of the strongest observations at Göbekli Tepe is that animal repertoires are not evenly distributed among the major enclosures.
The excavation project itself identified a striking pattern:
Enclosure A — snakes
Enclosure B — foxes
Enclosure C — boars
Enclosure D — birds
The excavators have suggested that these differences may correspond to different communities or social groups responsible for particular buildings.
The relational-ecological method does not require rejecting that interpretation.
It asks whether identity and function might overlap.
Human communities often define themselves through what they do.
Scout.
Healer.
Builder.
Hunter.
Water keeper.
Mediator.
Protector.
The possibility therefore exists that an animal association might encode both social identity and a characteristic mode of operating.
This leads to the Five-Function Response Architecture developed as a test model:
Serpent — Sense / Transform
Fox — Orient / Adapt
Boar — Disturb / Reorganize
Bird — Cross / Carry / Return
Wildcat — Regulate / Intervene
These are not proposed translations of Neolithic iconography.
They are ecological capacity clusters.
Their value depends entirely on whether the archaeological distribution continues to support them.
Together they form a hypothetical stress-response sequence:
detect change
→ find a viable path
→ alter obstructive structure
→ carry continuity across disruption
→ regulate force so intervention does not become runaway destruction
This is recognizable in many living systems without requiring ancient people to possess modern systems terminology.
An animal community does it.
An organism does it.
An ecosystem under disturbance does it.
The research question is whether the architectural differentiation at Göbekli Tepe may encode an analogous organization of different capacities within a coordinated whole.
That possibility becomes more interesting because the major enclosures are themselves geometrically related rather than simply scattered independently.
If differentiated animal repertoires occur inside differentiated but coordinated buildings, then the analytical unit may need to move one scale upward:
animal → enclosure function → site system
This is the first place where the method becomes genuinely architectural rather than merely iconographic.
5. Directionality: Meaning Is Something Figures Do to One Another
Animal presence alone is insufficient.
A snake facing an aurochs is different from a snake isolated on a stone.
Two animals facing a central object are different from two animals facing away from one another.
An animal moving toward a center is relationally different from one moving outward.
Direction therefore acts as a constraint on interpretation.
Published work already demonstrates that orientation matters at Göbekli Tepe.
Busacca identified a predominant centripetal orientation in animal figures, contributing to a visual convergence toward the social interior of the enclosures.
The excavation project provides an especially useful negative control in Pillar 6 of Enclosure B. Its reliefs occur on the backside of the pillar and face away from the central pillars; the team specifically treats this abnormal orientation as evidence that the pillar was reused.
That is important.
If orientation were irrelevant, incorrect orientation would tell archaeologists nothing.
Instead, its violation helps diagnose secondary placement.
We can therefore confidently say:
relational orientation belonged to the architectural grammar.
This allows a more rigorous set of questions:
Does an animal face toward or away from the center?
Does it ascend or descend?
Does it confront another organism?
Does it flank something?
Does it hold something?
Is it paired?
Does a second figure mirror it?
What occurs between them?
The meaning may reside in the vector.
This produces one of the central methodological principles of this paper:
Read relationships as actions.
Not simply:
snake.
But:
snake → object
Not:
vulture and human.
But:
vulture ↔ headless human
Not:
pillars.
But:
peripheral pillar → paired central pillars
Once direction becomes part of the analytical unit, imagery begins behaving less like a dictionary and more like a grammar.
6. Above and Below: Ecological Registers
Pillar 56 is especially useful because it demonstrates vertical organization rather than simply species presence.
Birds occupy an upper sequence; snakes occur below; another serpent curls downward.
This does not prove a later cosmology of heaven, earth and underworld.
But it does permit a falsifiable ecological question:
Does the organism's lived domain predict where it is placed within the composition?
Airborne animals should disproportionately occupy upper registers.
Terrestrial animals should occupy different registers.
Crawling or burrowing organisms may occur lower.
If a statistically meaningful pattern appears across the corpus, ecological domain becomes part of the visual grammar.
If the distribution does not hold, the hypothesis should be abandoned.
Recent relational scholarship on Göbekli Tepe has independently proposed that distinctions among sky, earth and subterranean domains may be relevant to its imagery, although such cosmological readings remain interpretive.
The method proposed here therefore stays one step lower:
first measure the ecological distribution.
Only then ask whether a cosmology was built from it.
7. The Center: Pairing Without Immediate Sovereignty
The monumental buildings repeatedly draw attention toward their central T-pillars.
In major enclosures, the center is often occupied not by one pillar but a pair of larger freestanding anthropomorphic pillars. Archaeological analysis confirms both their anthropomorphic attributes and the repeated paired arrangement.
This deserves methodological caution.
Paired central pillars do not prove democracy.
They do not prove gender balance.
They do not prove the Buffered Trinity model.
They do not prove that prehistoric people rejected hierarchy.
Indeed, recent scholarship explicitly argues that forms of hierarchy may have existed within Göbekli Tepe's relational ontology.
But paired centrality establishes something more basic:
centrality is not identical with singularity.
That matters.
One center can be held by more than one differentiated figure.
Haklay and Gopher further identify a spatial point between the central pillars that geometrically connects central and surrounding arrangements.
This gives us a useful structural concept:
The relational center.
The important center may sometimes be between the major figures rather than reducible to either one.
This is the archaeological basis for what the larger Forgotten Language project calls the Buffered Center:
1 + held relation + 1
It remains a working hypothesis, not an archaeological identification.
The question it generates is testable:
Do paired figures and mediated centers recur?
Do intervening objects occur between facing figures?
Are surrounding participants consistently oriented toward relational rather than singular centers?
Does this organization travel across nearby sites?
The value of the concept lies in those predictions.
8. Anthropomorphic Architecture: When the Building Becomes a Participant
The T-pillars create an even deeper methodological problem for conventional categories.
They are architecture.
But they are also bodies.
The large pillars of Enclosure D carry human arms, hands, belts and garments. Smaller surrounding pillars participate in the same T-shaped anthropomorphic vocabulary.
The building therefore does not simply contain representations of beings.
Beings constitute the building.
This gives us a working proposition:
The building behaves like a body made of participants.
Central bodies are larger and more freestanding.
Peripheral bodies are more closely embedded in walls or benches.
Animal images occupy those anthropomorphic architectural bodies.
Living people then enter and sit within the same spatial field.
This creates at least four categories of participant:
central anthropomorphic bodies
peripheral anthropomorphic bodies
animal actors
living human participants
Busacca's performative analysis similarly treats the enclosures as social spaces in which human and non-human agents converge.
The architectural distinction between observer and representation therefore becomes unstable.
The person entering the enclosure is not simply looking at a picture.
They enter a composition.
That leads to another methodological category:
Enacted Architecture
image + architecture + participants → experience
The architecture may not merely communicate an idea.
It may create a state of relationship.
Sayburç gives us an unusually clear later example of this principle.
9. Sayburç: When Relationship Becomes Narrative
The Sayburç relief, discovered in a communal building in southeastern Anatolia, contains two related scenes carved into the inner face of a bench.
One shows a human confronting a bull while holding an object interpreted as a snake or rattle.
The other shows a frontal male human figure flanked by two leopards whose teeth are emphasized.
Crucially, the high-relief human looks outward into the communal room while other figures orient relationally toward one another. The excavator explicitly describes the relief as a narrative scene and emphasizes both the dangerous characteristics of the animals and the relational organization of the composition.
This matters because the image does not close on itself.
The human figure's gaze extends the composition into the room.
The gathered people participate in the scene.
So the analytical unit becomes:
human + leopard + gesture + orientation + bench + communal room + participants
That is precisely what the relational-ecological method predicts.
The animal cannot be decoded independently from what it is doing relative to the human and the audience.
Sayburç therefore provides evidence that action and relation—not merely emblematic identity—were significant within the wider regional image tradition.
Recent scholarship on Southwest Asian Neolithic imagery likewise emphasizes the possibility of developing symbolic codes and notes the evident action in the Sayburç composition.
10. Cross-Site Grammar: Same Language or Same Problem?
The most dangerous point in comparative archaeology is the moment visual resemblance becomes assumed cultural continuity.
This paper deliberately avoids that move.
Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Nevalı Çori and Sayburç are related through geography, chronology and broader early Neolithic traditions, but they are not identical sites.
Their differences are methodologically valuable.
Nevalı Çori used paired anthropomorphic T-pillars within rectangular architecture rather than reproducing Göbekli Tepe's monumental oval enclosures. Haklay and Gopher note that even there the paired pillars obey a comparable geometric positioning principle.
Sayburç shifts the relational grammar into narrative relief.
Other sites vary in anthropomorphic intensity, animal repertory, monumentality and spatial organization.
This produces a stronger test than visual copying.
If a method only works when sites look alike, it is probably reading style.
If it survives when the embodiment changes, it may be detecting organization.
The current cross-site hypothesis is therefore:
Early Neolithic communities in this region may have shared a relational architectural vocabulary in which anthropomorphic structures, animals, boundaries, centrality, direction and human participation were coordinated differently at different sites.
The strongest claim justified at present is shared relational grammar within a regional archaeological horizon, not one universal prehistoric religion.
11. Function Can Travel Without the Animal
This principle is essential if the method is ever applied beyond southeastern Anatolia.
A functional reading must not become a new symbolic dictionary.
Serpent does not eternally equal transformation.
Lion does not eternally equal protection.
Bird does not eternally equal orientation.
Instead:
Function is proposed as the possible invariant; the biological teacher may change.
Humans encountering different ecologies would learn comparable system capacities from different organisms.
A culture needing early-warning imagery might draw on deer, gazelle, dog, bird or some entirely different organism depending on habitat and relationship.
What matters is whether the organism's actual behavior and its placement converge on the proposed capacity.
This prevents the method from becoming another mythology concordance in which every serpent in history secretly means the same thing.
That would reproduce the very problem this method is designed to avoid.
12. What This Method Does Not Claim
Several limits must remain explicit.
It does not claim that ecological function was the only meaning.
Animals can simultaneously participate in ritual, ancestry, social identity, danger, hunting memory, cosmology and ecological knowledge.
It does not claim direct continuity between Göbekli Tepe and later named deities.
The chronological distance is enormous.
Functional resonance is not proof of genealogical transmission.
It does not claim the builders possessed modern systems theory.
People can understand functional relationships without formal scientific vocabulary.
Human engineering, animal tracking, healing and ecological management long predate modern terminology.
It does not claim that paired pillars prove egalitarian government.
Centrality and hierarchy may coexist with relational organization. Recent scholarship explicitly explores hierarchy within Göbekli Tepe's human–animal ontology.
It does not treat every attractive resemblance as evidence.
Cross-cultural comparison must privilege independent contextual evidence over visual similarity.
13. Falsification Criteria
A method becomes useful when it tells us how it can fail.
The relational-ecological hypothesis weakens if:
Animal placement is effectively random.
If species show no meaningful relationship to enclosure, direction, register, architecture or neighboring motifs, ecological-function interpretation loses explanatory power.
Ecological behavior does not predict composition.
If aerial animals are no more likely to appear in upper registers than burrowing animals, for example, the vertical ecological hypothesis should be abandoned.
Functional assignments have to change after every new example.
A theory that calls fox “adaptation” in one building and “death” in the next simply because the second interpretation is convenient is not testing anything.
Animal distribution is adequately explained by subsistence alone.
The depicted repertoire at Göbekli Tepe does not straightforwardly mirror the faunal diet—an observation already noted in scholarship—but subsistence remains a competing explanation that must always be tested.
Cross-site recurrence disappears with fuller publication.
If paired centers, directional patterns or functional clusters prove exceptional rather than recurring, the wider grammar must be narrowed accordingly.
Conventional explanations predict the evidence better.
If social identity, hunting narrative or known ritual practice explains placement more parsimoniously, the functional model should yield.
The objective is not to protect the hypothesis.
It is to discover whether it sees something real.
14. A Research Program
The method can now be formalized.
For every animal or motif:
A. Biological observation
What does this organism actually do?
Movement.
Sensing.
Reproductive strategy.
Predator/prey behavior.
Social organization.
Ecological effect.
Seasonal behavior.
Habitat.
B. Archaeological context
Where does the image occur?
Central/peripheral.
Interior/threshold.
Upper/lower register.
Freestanding/embedded.
Facing direction.
Associated architecture.
C. Relational composition
What does it interact with?
Human.
Animal.
Object.
Center.
Boundary.
Entrance.
Another enclosure.
Landscape feature.
D. Existing interpretation
What explanations have already been proposed?
E. Functional hypothesis
Does ecological behavior add explanatory power?
F. Prediction
Where else should the organism—or an ecological functional equivalent—appear if the hypothesis is correct?
G. Falsification
What observation would make us abandon the proposed relationship?
The method therefore does not end with interpretation.
It generates the next observation.
15. From Image to Grammar
This research began with animals.
But the implications are architectural.
A written language does not derive meaning only from individual words.
Meaning depends on:
position,
sequence,
relationship,
direction,
repetition,
difference.
The same may be true here.
The serpent alone may not be the message.
The serpent moving downward may be.
The vulture alone may not be the message.
The vulture beside death imagery may be.
The pillar alone may not be the message.
The pillar facing the center may be.
The pair alone may not be the message.
What they hold between them may be.
This is why the deepest analytical shift is from symbol to grammar.
The images may be nouns.
Their relationships behave like syntax.
Their directions behave like verbs.
Architecture gives them context.
Human participation gives them tense.
Conclusion
Göbekli Tepe does not need to be decoded as a single lost religion for its imagery to contain extraordinary information.
Its builders lived inside ecological systems that modern humans often encounter only indirectly.
Animals were not abstractions.
They were neighbors, predators, competitors, warnings, food sources, scavengers, seasonal signals and teachers of movement.
Water, soil, death, reproduction and weather were not theoretical systems.
They were conditions of survival.
It is therefore reasonable to test whether the organisms carved into monumental architecture were meaningful partly because of the capacities those organisms demonstrated in life.
The archaeological evidence already establishes several important foundations for that test:
animal repertoires vary among enclosures;
many images participate in centripetal and directional compositions;
orientation is significant enough that incorrect facing can identify pillar reuse;
central anthropomorphic pillars repeatedly occur in pairs;
multiple major enclosures appear to have been geometrically coordinated;
and neighboring early Neolithic sites preserve related but non-identical forms of anthropomorphic, animal and narrative architecture.
None of those observations proves the functional interpretation proposed here.
Together, they make it testable.
The larger proposition is simple:
Ancient imagery may preserve not only stories about the world, but observations about how a living world works.
If so, the task is not to construct another universal dictionary of symbols.
It is to reconstruct relationships.
What senses?
What protects?
What crosses?
What transforms?
What returns death to circulation?
What surrounds the center?
What moves toward it?
What moves away?
What changes when one part is removed?
And what larger whole do those relationships allow to continue?
The question is not only what an ancient image represented.
It is what relationship the image was helping the architecture perform.
Research Status
Locked within the Forgotten Language research architecture: relational/buffered-center method; Five-Function Response Architecture as a stable test instrument; cross-site comparative protocol; directionality as analytical evidence; function-first methodology.
Strong working model: animal imagery can be productively tested as ecological-functional information when behavior, placement, direction and architecture converge.
Still hypothetical: that the complete Göbekli Tepe architectural system intentionally encoded a unified living-systems operating architecture.
Not claimed: direct continuity to later named gods or goddesses, a single primordial religion, or a literal prehistoric version of the modern Ark architecture.
The evidence gets the final vote.