Ayanlar

What Ayanlar is

Ayanlar Höyük lies about 30 km west of Şanlıurfa, and roughly the same distance from Göbekli Tepe. It was recorded during a surface survey in 2013 and introduced to the international literature by Bahattin Çelik in Documenta Praehistorica in 2017, as a new Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in south-eastern Türkiye.

By Çelik's account it is a large mound — reported at around 14 hectares — comparable in footprint to Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, and on those figures among the largest known Neolithic settlements in the group. That figure comes from survey rather than full excavation, so it describes the extent of scatter and mound, not a mapped built area.

Its position matters for the shape of the region. Most of the well-known Taş Tepeler sites cluster east and south-east of Şanlıurfa, in and around the Tek Tek Mountains. Ayanlar pulls the known distribution the other way, to the west.

A knot in the name

Ayanlar Höyük also carries the local name Gre Hut, which is the form Çelik used in the title of his 2017 paper. That is the alternative name attached to this site.

It should not be confused with Gre Filla, a separate Pre-Pottery Neolithic mound near Bismil in Diyarbakır province — a different site, in a different province, excavated since 2018 under the Diyarbakır Museum, and threatened by the Ambar dam. The two names look and sound alike and both circulate in Neolithic coverage, but Ayanlar (Gre Hut) and Gre Filla are distinct places with distinct teams.

What has been found

Until excavation began in 2025, everything published about Ayanlar came from surface collection, and the diagnostic objects are now held in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum. The recorded stone finds include upper and lower grindstones, pestles, a pebble hatchet, stone dishes, a stone cube, a fragment of a decorated stone vessel, and a sculpture fragment interpreted as the head of a leopard or lion.

The decorated vessel is the piece most worth attention. Çelik noted that it, and a stone dish from the site, closely resemble finds from Körtik Tepe — worked and decorated stone vessels are a recurring craft tradition across this region, one of the threads that ties smaller sites to the larger ones.

The predatory-animal sculpture fragment is recorded here as reported rather than settled. Çelik compared it to the carved lions at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, but it is a fragment recovered from the surface, not the subject of a dedicated published study, and fragmentary sculpture is easy to over-identify.

The Turkish–Japanese excavation

On 19 September 2025, excavation formally opened at Ayanlar with a ceremonial first strike by Türkiye's Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, and Princess Akiko of Mikasa of Japan. The dig runs within the Taş Tepeler programme, coordinated by Necmi Karul.

On the Japanese side, Yoshihiro Nishiaki, director of the University of Tokyo Museum, spoke at the opening, and the work is backed by the Chiba Institute of Technology. Officials framed it as a continuation of nearly forty years of Japanese fieldwork in Türkiye that began at Kaman-Kalehöyük in the mid-1980s; the same style of wooden pickaxes first used there was used again to break ground at Ayanlar.

Princess Akiko suggested that Ayanlar, sitting close to Göbekli Tepe, could have housed some of the people who built those monuments. That is a hope voiced at a groundbreaking, not an established finding — the excavation had barely started when it was said.

Dating and what's still unknown

Çelik placed Ayanlar between the early and middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B on the basis of comparisons with Körtik Tepe, Göbekli Tepe, Nevalı Çori and Karahan Tepe. There is no published radiocarbon series to anchor the site, so anything more precise, including how it relates in time to the flagship sites, currently runs ahead of the evidence.

Its full extent, internal phasing and architecture are all open questions. This is simply the normal condition of a site published less than a decade ago and excavated only from 2025. With a permanent international team now working it, that is exactly the part of this profile most likely to change season by season.