What was found
During the 2025 excavation season at Göbekli Tepe — roughly five months of work under project director Necmi Karul — archaeologists recovered a human statue with clearly defined head and torso.
It came from the ground between Enclosures B and D, two of the four great round buildings that made the site famous.
Why the findspot matters
Göbekli Tepe's human imagery has always been outnumbered by its animals. Foxes, snakes, boars, vultures and scorpions dominate the pillars; people appear rarely, and usually as the T-pillars themselves — faceless bodies with arms, hands and belts.
So a free-standing human figure is not routine. And its position between two enclosures places it in the space between buildings rather than inside one, which raises the same question the 2025 wall-embedded figure raised: where were human images meant to stand in relation to the architecture?
As with much at Göbekli Tepe, the object is secure and the interpretation is not.
The pattern across the region
This is now part of a run. Karahan Tepe produced a T-shaped pillar carved with a clearly defined human face in the same season, and a second human statue matching the pose and style of the first major figure found there. Sayburç produced a human statue with carved ribs, a deliberately closed mouth, and eyes resembling shell.
Individually each is a find. Together they suggest the human figure was a shared subject across the Taş Tepeler sites, handled differently at each — and that the imagery was never as animal-dominated as the early publications made it look.