What was found
At a briefing held at the Karahan Tepe visitor centre on 26 November 2025, Türkiye's Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, revealed finds from the fifth year of the Taş Tepeler project. Among them were two human faces from Sefertepe, carved onto neatly dressed stone blocks — one in high relief, one in low relief. From the same area came a small black serpentinite bead carved with a human face on each side.
Reports place the faces at roughly 10,000–12,000 years old. As with any active dig, exact dating will firm up as the material is studied and published.
Why it matters
The striking thing is the style. The cheeks, brows and noses of the Sefertepe faces don't quite match the faces known from Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe or Sayburç — which suggests Sefertepe had developed its own local way of carving a face within the shared Taş Tepeler world.
That is exactly the pattern this whole region keeps revealing: not one central sanctuary with satellites, but a network of communities, each with its own hand, all working through the same deep questions about the human face, the body, and the dead.
The beads say Sefertepe was not isolated
The double-faced bead was not alone. Dozens were recovered in the 2025 season, carved from jade, labradorite and limestone — several shaped as snake heads, others incised with geometric patterns.
Jade and labradorite are not local to this geology. They arrived through exchange, or through procurement routes that took people a long way from Viranşehir.
"Sefertepe's bead assemblage clearly shows that this was not an isolated settlement," says excavation director Assoc. Prof. Emre Güldoğan. "People here were connected — and they expressed those connections in the materials they chose."
This is a quieter finding than a carved face, and arguably a more important one. Monumental architecture tells you a community could organise labour. Imported stone tells you it was plugged into something much larger.
Two ways of treating the dead, metres apart
Sefertepe's mortuary evidence is unusual even by the standards of this region. In the small chamber excavators named the skull room, human skulls were deliberately placed — most lacking mandibles, with no other bones present. That is selection, not collapse or disturbance.
Just metres to the north, a contrasting pattern: individuals interred with their full skeletal remains.
So two mortuary logics operated side by side. Some people were curated after death, their skulls gathered into what may have functioned as a communal archive of ancestors. Others were left whole. Fragmentation and wholeness, selection and preservation, coexisted in the same settlement.
Skulls appear in symbolic architecture across the Taş Tepeler region, but this dual system appears to be Sefertepe's own.
One thing the sources disagree about
The Ministry of Culture and Tourism briefing described the double-faced bead as black serpentinite. A later feature on the same season described it as black basalt.
We follow the ministry announcement, as the primary source. But the discrepancy is real and unresolved in the published reporting, and we would rather flag it than quietly pick one. The material will be settled when the season is properly published.