Intentional Enclosure as Symbolic Sealing: Network Analysis of Motif Discontinuity and Ritual Closure in Taş Tepeler Sites

The deliberate backfilling of monumental enclosures at Taş Tepeler sites (Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, and related locations) represents one of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic’s most enigmatic practices. While widely recognized as intentional ritual closure, the symbolic mechanisms and cognitive implications remain underexplored. This paper applies network analysis to published motif inventories, treating motifs as nodes and co-occurrences on pillars/enclosures as edges. Metrics reveal systematic discontinuity: high-centrality fauna motifs (e.g., fox, boar, snake) dominate early phases with segregated clusters at Göbekli Tepe, declining sharply pre-burial as anthropomorphic and vulture-head motifs rise in integrated hubs at Karahan Tepe. This pattern supports a hypothesis of burial as active "sealing" of symbolic knowledge—retiring potent motifs to close ritual phases, attenuate physical access, and force reliance on oral/mnemonic transmission ("information decay" into collective memory). Implications include enhanced symbolic complexity, social curation of identity, homeostatic reset facilitating hierarchy, and resolution of continuity to later Neolithic cultures (e.g., transformed motifs at Çatalhöyük). By quantifying motif networks across buried contexts, this study reframes intentional enclosure as deliberate knowledge management, with parallels to systemic resilience in biological and computational domains.