The site appears to have had functional zones for different activities, with the monumental buildings forming one part of a more complex site structure.

It is worth noting that the distinction between “sacred” and “secular” space in the pre-modern world, including the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, is often less clear-cut than modern Western assumptions tend to make it.

In many cultures, the spaces associated with ritual and communal ceremony are also the spaces where important practical decisions are made, where alliances are formed, where goods are exchanged, where young people are initiated into adult status, where the dead are commemorated.

The idea that Göbekli Tepe was either purely sacred or purely secular imposes a distinction that the people who built and used it would likely not have recognized.