This is not merely an absence of information.

It is a genuine limit on what archaeology — or any external analytical approach — can recover from the material record of a culture without writing.

The gap between the form of an image and the specific meaning it carried in its original cultural context can, in some cases, be partially bridged through analogy with related or descendant cultures that have explanatory traditions.

The challenge with Göbekli Tepe is that we have no direct cultural descendants of the specific communities that built the site, no oral traditions that specifically explain these specific images, no texts — for there were no texts — that decode the symbolic vocabulary.