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Person

Klaus Schmidt

A man with short gray hair and glasses, wearing a dark collared shirt, stands against a plain background.

German prehistorian (1953–2014) who, in 1994, recognised that an unremarkable hill near Şanlıurfa, filed by an earlier American survey as a medieval cemetery, was in fact a Pre-Pottery Neolithic monument. He directed the excavations there for the German Archaeological Institute until his sudden death from a heart attack while swimming. His "temple of the hunter-gatherers" reading shaped the public understanding of the site; his successors have since revised much of it.

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