What monumental architecture is older than Göbekli Tepe?
That's a very different question than what I said. The word "monument" in archaeology denotes a mental relation between the human and the space modified by the structure. It's not something inherent to the structure itself. You can have structures that are monumental that we can't easily identify as such today (many burial mounds were like this), structures we see as monumental that the original inhabitants would not have (some midden heaps, tells and urban centers), or monumental structures with no physical components like the Nazi's Cathedral of Light.
Gobekli Tepe is monumental in an extremely obvious way, which means GT Layer III constructions are the earliest securely dated structures that are obviously monumental. If that's what you mean, I agree.
The oldest parts of nearby Karahan Tepe are probably of similar age from archaeoastronomical evidence, but aren't as well preserved or securely dated. Tell Qaramel is much older than GT and has large constructions that some have argued were monumental. The monumental relationship isn't as clear as GT though. Tells themselves can often be monumental and we have many tells older than GT. Other sites from the same or earlier periods (PPNA) as GT layer III like the tower at Jericho or the communal structures at Cemka hoyuk, Jerf el-Ahmar and Tell Abr may not have been monumental in the same way, but were large constructions involving large amounts of manpower.
I'll let you make your own decisions about whether any of these count as monumental. I'm just emphasizing that Gobekli Tepe isn't a totally standalone precursor that's wildly distant from anything else we've found. It's an old and beautiful site that existed within the broader context of an entire landscape of early neolithic structures.
"I'm just emphasizing that Gobekli Tepe isn't a totally standalone precursor that's wildly distant from anything else we've found. It's an old and beautiful site that existed within the broader context of an entire landscape of early neolithic structures."
I think that suggests to me a greater level of sophistication for neolithic cultures than we give credit for in our current histories.
At least when I took world history and anthropology classes, the academic term for 'monumental architecture' was quite well defined: large-scale man-made structures that are built to impress and convey symbolic meanings. Göbekli Tepe is definitely that. The definition you offer seems quite subjective, and maybe more suited to art history than archeology.
I'm an archaeologist (or was?) who's specifically done work on the Neolithic transition. I don't know much about art history, so I couldn't say whether they'd use a similar definition.
What's often taught in introductory classes is usually more of a basic outline of actual archaeological thought rather than a perfect reflection of literature. Not knowing your curriculum, level, or when you were in school, but it probably came up with either Childe's 10 traits or from Trigger's definition. Childe's definition is basically anything that shows off power. Trigger's definition is anything that's elaborated beyond practical function, either in size or ornamentation. The common examples when teaching both of these are large structures, but that's mainly a bias in common examples. Size isn't the sole factor, just one of several and the easiest to observe because of the inherent labor costs. It also makes for a nice exercise to have students wander around campus looking for monumental architecture and explaining why different structures are or aren't.
Over the last 20ish years people have moved away from emphasizing the size aspect because it doesn't encompass what we want to include, particularly as we look at things a little more exotic than classical centers like southern Mesopotamia. Joyce Marcus had an explicit response to Trigger that's pretty well known de-emphasizing size, Rosemary Joyce (unrelated) argued that the size aspect was a category error in monumentality of early mesoamerican pyramid construction, and Osborne gave a definition that's very similar to what I said above. I'm doing the same thing here to make it clear that the actual physical size of the structure isn't what's important, the intangible mental aspects are.
I still don't understand your intangible mental aspects claim. That seems a nonphysical, and really nonscientific subjective evaluation. You didn't go back in time and interview the builders, so how do you know what the intangible mental aspects were? It's guesswork.
Physical size isn't necessary, and I didn't mean to clean that it was. The more fundamental connection would be labor expenditure, and directed organization. There's a bunch of old cities in the Levant that were occupied for thousands of years and which developed into very large beehive-like structures. These aren't monumental architecture in the way a smaller, but purpose-built temple or city walls would be.
The connection to 'civilization', as I understand it, is that a social organization beyond mere family units making incremental home improvements over generations is required to build monumental architecture, so it directly implies the existence of some form of societal structure to organize the work. That's what turns a 'culture' into a 'civilization.'
That seems a nonphysical, and really nonscientific subjective evaluation.
We're talking past each other a bit because we're referring to different things with our use of "monumental" though. I'm talking about monumental as a way of understanding how the structure was perceived and used by humans. You're using monumental as a way of understanding to the social organization of the society that constructed it. This is much more in line with Childe's use that I mentioned earlier.
Part of the problem is that the scale and sophistication of social organization associated with the classical mesopotamian states is not at all reflective of what would have been going on with Gobekli Tepe. In other words, we wouldn't traditionally call the GT builders a "civilization" (civilization being a bad word that makes archaeologists cry).
So let's go back to the scale and grandeur thing. If we have to understand the intention, that's one of the tangibles encapsulated in my definition. What I'm saying is that it's the mental relationship between the human, the structure and the context that gives rise to monumentality. The physical structure can facilitate that creation by intentional design (e.g. large imposing size, etc), but it can also arise naturally or change over time.
We don't actually understand enough of the ancient world to definitively establish monumentality everywhere because our understanding of those intangibles is so patchy. The tower of Jericho was thought to be monumental for many years because of the obvious size and labor investment it represents. The thinking nowadays is that it had more utilitarian purposes and probably wasn't monumental. The structure is the same either way, the only thing that's changed there is our understanding of how ancient people would have engaged with it.