One of the eastern hills
Sefertepe connects to Taş Tepeler geographically and culturally. It sits in the hills east of Şanlıurfa, in the same landscape as Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, and it shares their defining features: T-shaped pillars, carved human faces, and a focus on the dead — a reported gathering of human skulls.
Those shared features are exactly what the Taş Tepeler program was set up to study: not a few isolated wonders, but a connected network of related Pre-Pottery Neolithic communities across the region.
What it adds to the network
Sefertepe helps show how widely the core Taş Tepeler ideas spread. The T-pillar, the carved face, the special treatment of the human head — these recur from the great sites to smaller ones like Sefertepe, mapping a shared symbolic world across many hills. As one of the less-excavated sites, its role in that network may grow as excavation and publication continue.
Common questions
How does Sefertepe connect to Taş Tepeler?
It sits in the same hills east of Şanlıurfa and shares the network's defining features — T-pillars, carved human faces, and a focus on the dead — making it part of the connected Pre-Pottery Neolithic world the Taş Tepeler program studies.
Sources & further reading2 references
- Clare, L. (2020). Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. A brief summary of research at a new World Heritage Site (2015–2019). e-Forschungsberichte des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 2020(2): 81–88.
- The Tepe Telegrams (official research blog of the Göbekli Tepe Project, DAI). The Tepe Telegrams. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. link Accessible, authoritative running commentary from the excavation team.
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →