This is the mother of all archaeological crackpot magnets. Not because of its size (though the site is large) or its grand height (it was buried for almost 10,000 years), but because radio-carbon dating gave us reliable estimates of the age of its construction (~10k BC at the latest) and the time at which it was buried under sand and sediment (~ 8000 BC). We don’t know why it was buried, if it was deliberate human activity or if some catastrophic event. The age of its founding is a serious shift for anthropology, because it either implies that hunter-gatherers could (and would) build enormous temple structures, or that dawn of agriculture was a at least a full 2 millennia earlier than is currently believed.
