What Is Çakmaktepe?

Found from orbit

Çakmaktepe was identified in 2021 through satellite image analysis carried out for the Prehistoric Survey of Şanlıurfa City Centre and Surroundings (ŞAYA). Excavation began the same year, run jointly by Çukurova University and the Şanlıurfa Museum within the Taş Tepeler project.

It sits on the Eocene limestone plateau of the Fatik mountains at around 670 m above sea level, roughly 20 km south-west of central Şanlıurfa and some 30 km from Göbekli Tepe. The settlement covers about 150 m across, with further traces beyond that core.

Houses cut into rock

The striking thing about Çakmaktepe is that its buildings were not raised — they were carved. Excavation has exposed circular, single-room dwellings cut directly into the bedrock, roughly 3.5 to 6 m in diameter, with sunken floors.

Around fifty of these have been identified. They are not improvised shelters. Their geometry and finish indicate deliberate planning and real labour invested in making durable living space.

Alongside the houses are much larger rock-cut buildings, reaching up to about 16 m across, with wide open interiors, benches and postholes. These read as gathering spaces — communal architecture, but of a different kind from the T-pillar enclosures a short distance away.

What people were doing there

The house floors carry the residue of ordinary life: grinding stones, mortar holes cut into the rock, and tools for food preparation and craft work. This is a site that tells you about processing, storing and eating rather than about ritual display.

That domestic emphasis is why Çakmaktepe matters. Şahin and Massa's 2025 study in Antiquity on mass-hunting in south-west Asia at the dawn of sedentism draws on evidence from the Şanlıurfa region, placing sites like this in the argument about how communities fed themselves as they began to stay put.

Is it older than Göbekli Tepe?

You will see this claim often, and it needs care.

Reporting linked to the excavation places Çakmaktepe in the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, around 9600–8800 BCE — which overlaps Göbekli Tepe rather than preceding it. Other accounts describe the site as Late Epipalaeolithic to early PPNA, around 10500–9500 BCE, which would put part of its life earlier.

Both ranges circulate. Neither is currently backed in English by a published radiocarbon series you can check. What is clear is that Çakmaktepe's architecture belongs to an earlier tradition than the great enclosures — round bedrock houses rather than monumental rings. Being architecturally earlier in character is not the same thing as being chronologically older, and the two get conflated constantly.

Why it changes the picture

For years the Taş Tepeler story was told through monuments, which left an obvious hole: where were these people actually living?

Çakmaktepe is part of the answer. Fifty rock-cut houses with grinding equipment and communal buildings is a settlement, not a sanctuary. Set beside Göbekli Tepe, it suggests a landscape in which monumental and domestic life were both present and reasonably close together — and it undercuts the older idea of ceremonial centres standing empty in an unpopulated countryside.

What is still unknown

Çakmaktepe has been excavated for only a few seasons. Its internal phasing, its full extent, the relationship between the small houses and the large rock-cut buildings, and above all its absolute chronology are open questions. Most of what circulates in English comes from season reporting rather than final publication.

The Turkish-language excavation reports (Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı) and the Arkeoloji Dergisi article on the site's hunter-gatherer settlers carry more detail than anything currently available in English.