Klaus Schmidt (archaeologist)
German archaeologist (1953–2014)
Klaus Schmidt (11 December 1953 – 20 July 2014) was a German archaeologist and prehistorian who led the excavations at Göbekli Tepe from 1996 to 2014.
Education and career
Klaus Schmidt studied pre- and protohistory, and classical archaeology and geology at the universities of Erlangen and Heidelberg. He completed his doctorate in 1983 at Heidelberg University under the direction of Harald Hauptmann. He received a travel stipend from the German Archaeological Institute from 1984 to 1986. From 1986 to 1995, he received a research stipend from the German Research Foundation. He was employed at the Institute of pre- and proto-history of the Heidelberg University, working on various projects with the German Archaeological Institute and the Heidelberg University.
In 1995, he became the leader of the excavations at Gürcütepe and Göbekli Tepe in Southeast Turkey. Schmidt purchased a house in nearby Urfa, which became his base of operations. His team of archaeologists typically excavated the site of Göbekli Tepe for two months in the spring and two months in the fall.
He received his habilitation in 1999 from the University of Erlangen and in 2000 became Privatdozent in Pre- and Proto-history at the Institute for Pre- and Proto-history of the University of Erlangen.
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This entry incorporates text from “Klaus Schmidt (archaeologist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.