It matters because the label can lead readers toward a model of the site as a purely religious space built by purely religious motivations, when the evidence suggests something more interesting: that the social, practical, and ritual dimensions of life at Göbekli Tepe were integrated in ways that modern Western categories of “religious” versus “secular” do not capture well.

The people who built and used this place were not choosing between religion and practical social life.

They were living in a world where those dimensions were not yet separated.

The importance of Göbekli Tepe is not that it single-handedly caused agriculture, or that it proves religion came before farming, or that it was the birthplace of human civilization, or that it was built by a lost advanced culture.

Its importance is that it reveals, with unusual physical clarity, that complex social organization, symbolic culture, and the capacity for large-scale collective achievement are deeply rooted in human prehistory — present and active in the world more than eleven thousand years ago.