“Stone Hills”
Taş Tepeler — Turkish for “Stone Hills” — is the name for a whole landscape of Neolithic sites across the Şanlıurfa region of southeastern Türkiye, and for the research program that studies them together. It groups Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe with around a dozen related sites, including Sayburç, Sefertepe, Çakmaktepe, Ayanlar Höyük, Harbetsuvan, and Gürcütepe.
The idea behind the name is simple but powerful: these places are not isolated wonders. They are pieces of a single connected world of hunter-gatherer communities who, some eleven thousand years ago, built monuments, carved animals and humans in stone, and set the stage for the Neolithic way of life.
One world, many sites
Each site adds something the others don't. Göbekli Tepe offers the great free-standing enclosures; Karahan Tepe its bedrock-carved rooms; Sayburç a narrative relief of humans and animals on a building wall; Sefertepe its carved faces and gathered skulls; Çakmaktepe some of the earliest ground of all. Read together, they let archaeologists trace how ideas, images, and ways of building spread and changed across a region and across centuries.
Studying them as a group — rather than one dig at a time — is what makes Taş Tepeler important. It turns a scatter of remarkable sites into the story of a whole society at the dawn of the Neolithic.
Why it matters now
Taş Tepeler is one of the most active frontiers in world archaeology. Several of its sites are being excavated at once, and new discoveries arrive regularly. For visitors, it means the region around Şanlıurfa is not a single monument but an entire landscape of the human past — the place where our species first learned to build big.
Common questions
What does Taş Tepeler mean?
It's Turkish for “Stone Hills.” It refers to a cluster of related Neolithic sites across the Şanlıurfa region and the research program studying them together.
What sites are part of Taş Tepeler?
Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe are the most famous, alongside Sayburç, Sefertepe, Çakmaktepe, Ayanlar Höyük, Harbetsuvan, Gürcütepe, and others — around a dozen in all.
How old are the Taş Tepeler sites?
They date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, broadly 10,000 to 8,000 BCE, making the oldest of them around 11,000 to 12,000 years old.
Sources & further reading3 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.
- Karul, N. (2021). Buried Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Karahantepe. Türk Arkeoloji ve Etnografya Dergisi 82: 19–29.
- Özdoğan, E. (2022). The Sayburç reliefs: a narrative scene from the Neolithic. Antiquity 96(390): 1599–1605. doi:10.15184/aqy.2022.125
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →