"Immortal Olive trees" at Gobekli Tepe?

YouTuber and tour guide Mike Collins recently posted up to a video on the removal of trees from the outluying areas of the tell on top of the hiss at Gobekli Tepe due to the insistence of the Turkish heritage protection authorities. Two things should be noted:

1) this action has NO connection with teh archaeological team working on the site - who are there as 'guests' of the same archaeological resource management authorities (still less foreign archaeologists giving their opinion about the situation) and

2) Despite his own self-aggrandising claims, this had nothing to do with the clickbait hate campaign conducted on his Twitter account by US YouTuber Jimmy Corsetti (who appears not to be able to read or write Turkish) slagging off at every opportunity the work of the Turkish authorities in a xenophobic and orientalist attack egging on his 188.9K followers to participate, which - being the gathering of gullible hate-filled social inadequates he has gathered around him - they did. The decision to remove the trees was taken after they had fulfilled their function (in raising the compensation landowners would get for the appropriation of their fields by the state). There seems to be some misapprehension about the "damage trees do" to archaeology. Corsetti's followers and a lot of others simply accept his unqualified statement that "trees damage archaeological remains" and therefore the Turks allowing trees to grow on a farmer's land on a Turkish hilltop means they are bad faith actors ("covering up something/ preventing acdcess to something/ and allowing it to be destroyed"). They cannot understand that archaeologists say, "not necessarily" for good reason and from their bad faith viewpoint see that as sme kind of a nefarious plot or archaeologist (or a symptom of the alleged stupidity of archaeologist, because "its obvious - innit?"). What is obvious is that Maya pyramids or Cambodian temples in tropical forests suffer damage if tree roots penetrate between stones and as the tree grows and the roots get thicker, force the masonry apart. There are pictures of (relatively rare) situations where a tree growing in a crack in a rocj k has actually split a rock. I suspect these are the pictures that most easily comes to the mind of the enthusiast for history brought up on films of "secrets of the jungle" or that ilk. The truth is that all over the world reliefs, temples, sculptures and earthwork sites are recovered from jungle environments where there is no particularly serious damage. So it is a spectrum.

The other damaging mechanism is when a tree blows/falls over taking a root mat with it, ripping it out of the ground. Now that is damaging, though there are some prehistoric (some very very old) that consist of precisely such tree-root hollows with artefacts dropped or washed into them. I suspect a lot of these folk actually have no idea from direct observation how plants grow and therefore have little idea of the mechanisms of how roots actually grow. They should plant some cress seeds on a wet piece of cloth on a saucer on the window sill, do bonsai, or buy one of those cat-grass kits from a pet shop (give the kitty a treat).

[Just for completeness, I'll add that another situation where trees do mean instant site-death is under commercial forestry where 'pan-buster' ploughs are driven through the soil to be planted (or replanted) to a depth of a meter. I've excavated sites in Poland treated in this way, all you get is a load of soil to shift to find loose artefacts scattered. The stratigraphy has gone. But this is not "trees" but "Forestry workers". It goes on right across northern Europe, I think I've seen it discussed in the US literature too - perhaps Canada also does it? I don't know about commercial palm oil plantations. Total disaster for the archaeology.] 

Because of this, we get strange notions published in pseudoarchaeological literature, for example in the case of the Kensington Runestone where the section of how it was entangled in tree roots ("so in the ground a very long time") shows a tree growing in a manner that no tree would ever grow - especially in such waterlogged conditions as this findspot. This is odd because the story of its discovery claims the finder dug out the treestump - yet did not see how the roots actually ran?

All these people totally ignore the fact that most prehistoric and Roman (and indeed most medieval) archaeological sites in temperate Europe (and even Saharan North Africa in the African Humid Phase) were densely forested for hundreds of years before clearance in the early modern period. The earthwork sites, fields and settlements being discovered in the Amazonian rainforest are excavatable despite being covered by jungle for hundreds of years. So what do these people mean when they say that Gobekli Tepe would be "destroyed by tree roots"? 

When a tree grows, the roots penetrate the ground as fine filaments that work their way round harder elements, seeking moisture and nutrition. There is very little of that in the middle of a stone or potsherd (or flint or metal object), they go around them. As the root thickens over the years (and not all roots do)  the objects beside it may be shifted sideways, or up (rarer-down) a centimetre or so unless they are more massive  and resist - and then it is the root that expands laterally the other way. When that tree dies and the roots rot (which they invariably do) any displaced objects may get moved by soil processes (bioturbation, frost heaving) back to more or less where they were before the tree grew. If the tree blows over of course it is a different story. 

Another fact that becomes apparent when you decide to get rid of a fruit tree in your orchard, or remove a tree growing on the back lawn too close to the house is that most trees have extensive roots growing laterally, often pretty close to the ground surface and the number of roots growing downward (including the major tap-root) is relatively minimal in normal cases. This is due to the access to oxygen and nutrients from the humic layer (and leaf mould on the surface from the tree itself and its neighbours). This is what gives a heavy tree its stability. When a tree blows over it is the failure of these lateral roots that is the cause. The upshot of this that at Gobekli had the trees continued to grow, most of the roots would be in the top layers (ploughsoil, hillwash, backfill, disturbed upper layers) rather than the deeper stratigraphy under them (especially as this site was previously in part ploughed in the recent past).

Archaeologists, who excavate and examine very closely dozens, hundreds of sites, where trees have previously grown, or are growing or will grow, know very well the scale and results of the effects of their roots. In the case of Gobekli Tepe, several of us expressed the opinion that in the current situation, the damage to the site was not as extreme as the YouTuber rant-mob was claiming. For that, we got insulted, called all manner of names, even calls were made for two separate archaeologists - totally unconnected with the tree-planting - should "lose their jobs" because they were not joining in with the online Turk-hating campaign. Irritatingly this was by people that I'd be willing to bet the majority of had never held a tree root in their hands in their sad lives.  

Anyway, the trees have been cut down to just above the ground surface (there was talk some had been "moved", I'm not clear if that is true and this would mean digging up quite a lot of soil with the roots). 

But the orientalist Turk-bashing goes on. Not even that satisfies the mob in America seeking affirmation of their own "superiority". The Turks "must" have done something wrong - there "must" be a way to show how "stupid" and "ignorant:" these brown-skinned foreign folk are.  So we see comments like this one by US "archaeoastronomer" and author (of "Searching for Osiris and The Tree of Life" etc ) RN Vooght

RN Vooght 𓁀𓀳 𓁢 𓂀 @VooghtRN Apr 3 2025
Removing them won't do anything, bud. The olive tree aka the immortal olive, continues to shoot from the root system after felling. The damage is irreparable. The builders of Gobekli Tepe were far brighter than those charged with maintaining it. It's Stone Age Archeology.

There is something tragi-comic about a guy in Trump's America writing in US English (not Turkish) addressing, apparently, the authorities in Turkey, one of the world's biggest olive producers - informing them "how olive trees grow" and how "incompetent" they are to think they have solved this problem. The guy seems not to have noted the significance of the fact that in the latest material we see slocks of sheep shepherded into the fields where the tree stumps are. One could spray or impregnate the stumps to prevent them from shooting, but a far more ecological approach is to use sheep to periodically nibble the new shoots. Perhaps, Mr Vooght, there are some people in Turkey that know as much, and indeed much more about site management than you do. Just reflect on that.