Ralph Appelbaum Associates

A 90-minute temporary installation at the World Economic Forum Gala night in the Continental Hotel, Davos, Switzerland, introduces the oldest excavated site built by mankind as a temple in 11,600 BC. Archaeologists are still excavating Göbeklitepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas about our species’ deep past.

The installation was created as a similar circular layout to the temples, positioning quests at the center of the temple, surrounded by translucent scrims. The show is the abstract sequence of the Neolithic Revolution – the critical transition that resulted in the birth of agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and priests to ask the same questions: why people made these temples, what they wanted to communicate, what they were searching for, and what we still search for.