Getting to the Bottom of Jimmy Corsetti's Göbekli Tepe Olive Tree Conspiracy

​Many of my readers have likely encountered social media pseudohistory gadfly Jimmy Corsetti’s claim that archaeologists were negligent about olive trees that were planted atop Göbekli Tepe prior to the Turkish government seizing the land and these trees have damaged the ruins still buried beneath the ground. Corsetti has hammered this claim across the media for months, leading to a conspiracy theory that archaeologists purposely allowed the trees to damage the site, either through malice or incompetence that only the heroic Corsetti could expose. It’s worth putting on record that Corsetti’s conspiracy theory is based on a mistranslation he has never checked against the original.

​The land where Göbekli Tepe sits was once private property. After the Stone Age ruins were discovered, the government eventually exerted eminent domain over the site, but under Turkish law, they had to pay the owners restitution for seizing their land. The owners planted hundreds of olive trees before the government took control of the land more than a decade ago in order to increase its value and thus the amount of money authorities would need to pay them.
 
Most of the trees were planted around fifteen years ago, and they were uprooted and relocated earlier this year.
 
Back in February, the archaeologist heading up excavations at the site explained that the olive trees were being removed. In the original Turkish, published in Cumhuriyet on February 11, Necmi Karul said:

Ağaçlar yıllar önce arazi sahipleri tarafından daha fazla kamulaştırma bedeli almak için dikilmiş. Araziler zeytinlik vasfında değil ve kamulaştırma bedeli ödenmiş yerler. Daha da önemlisi büyüdükçe alttaki arkeolojik dokuya zarar veriyorlar. Çoktan kaldırılmaları gerekiyordu ve bunun için koruma kurulunun da almış olduğu bir karar var. Ağaçların taşınması için doğru mevsim beklendi. Valiliğin koordinasyonuyla tarım il müdürlüğü, GAP Tarımsal Araştırma Enstitüsü ve ziraat odasından görüşler alındı. Göbeklitepe Danışma ve Eşgüdüm Komisyonu, mimarlar odası, muhtar gibi çeşitli bileşenleri olan bir kurul, onların da görüşü ağaçların taşınması yönünde. Şanlıurfa Orman Bölge Müdürlüğü ağaçların taşınacağı yeri hazırlıyor. Dolayısıyla ağaçlar taşınacak ve yaşamaya devam edecekler. Ayrıca UNESCO’nun da Dünya Miras Listesi’nde olan yerler için çok katı koruma kuralları var. Bu sadece alanın kendini değil çevresini, hatta bakı alanını da kapsayan bir koruma.

​Or, in English:

The trees were planted years ago by landowners in order to receive higher expropriation compensation. The lands are not classified as olive groves, and compensation has already been paid for them. More importantly, as the trees grow, they damage the archaeological strata beneath. They should have been removed long ago, and indeed there is already a decision from the preservation board to that effect. The appropriate season for transplanting the trees was awaited. Under the coordination of the governor’s office, opinions were sought from the provincial directorate of agriculture, the GAP Agricultural Research Institute, and the chamber of agriculture. The Göbeklitepe Advisory and Coordination Commission, which includes various bodies such as the chamber of architects and the local headman, has also expressed the view that the trees should be transplanted. The Şanlıurfa Regional Forestry Directorate is preparing the site where the trees will be moved. Therefore, the trees will be relocated and will continue to live. Moreover, UNESCO imposes very strict protection rules for places on the World Heritage List. This protection covers not only the site itself but also its surroundings and even its visual field.

Karul used the present continuous tense with an intensifier that made it into a progressive continuous construction. The progressive continuous construction (-dıkça), apparently—and I am no expert in Turkish—places the phrasing into an current and ongoing process, so “as they grow, they cause damage,” which means that the process of growth is (now and in the future) damaging, not necessarily that damage occurred in the past.
 
The broader context of Karul’s interview, which was focused on protective measures currently under construction, including new walkways to limit the impact of tourists and roofs to stop rain from reaching the ruins. “Precautions must be taken before problems arise,” Kaurl said, clearly implying that there are no issues currently affecting the archaeological remains.
 
Following the decision to move the trees, Karul also gave an interview to Turkish state media, which ran on the Tarim TV channel on February 14, in which he again repeated the same information using a conditional tense verb (verecek) that means that the damage is hypothetical:

Ağaçlar büyüdükçe kökleri yüzeyin altındaki kalıntılara zarar verecek duruma gelmiş durumda. Dolayısıyla bunların taşınması gerekiyor. Bunun için doğru mevsimi bekledik. Şu anda ağaç taşımak için ideal bir zaman.
 
As the trees grow, their roots have reached a point where they could damage the remains below the surface. Therefore, they need to be moved. We waited for the right season. Now is the ideal time to move the trees.

​The Turkish news outlet Anadolu Agency published the same interview with Karul for their English-language edition on February 13. (The Anadolu Agency logo is visible on the microphone held up in the video version, indicating the written version is from the same interview.) The published version quotes Karul as stating: “As the trees grew, their roots began to damage the remains beneath the surface. Therefore, they must be relocated. We waited for the right season, and now is the perfect time to move them.” It appears that the Anadolou Agency translated the quotation inaccurately, changing the conditional to the past tense.
 
This version, in English, was repeated and paraphrased across several knock-off articles posted across various websites in the days that followed.
 
Corsetti has seized on the change to the past tense in the English version to state that the roots have already done damage to Göbekli Tepe, something archaeologists deny. Indeed, the buried ruins beneath the now-relocated trees have not been excavated, so there is no damage to see, and there is no evidence from subsurface scans of damage from tree roots.
 
Corsetti continues citing the later English translations and insisted that the faulty English translation and paraphrased versions of it in knockoff news articles were both independent confirmation of his claim and more accurate than the original Turkish report.