The earlier interior animal-head context

A second animal-head pattern

This page keeps a distinction the excavation itself draws. Before the striking gazelle concentration of 2025, Çakmaktepe had already produced burnt animal heads — wild cattle, sheep or caprids, and equids — reported inside a special building, placed along the bases of its walls. That interior, wall-base placement is a different arrangement from the later gazelle skulls spread outside an exterior wall, and the two should not be flattened into a single event.

Taken together, the interior mixed-species deposit and the exterior gazelle deposit suggest that the deliberate, burnt treatment of animal heads at Çakmaktepe was a repeated practice across more than one context, rather than one exceptional act.

What remains open

This is field-reported material, and much is still unfixed. The formal structure label for the building, its full plan, a species breakdown, and secure context numbers all remain to be published. Whether this interior context and Special Building 15 are the same building at different phases, or genuinely separate structures, is not yet clear. As with all of Çakmaktepe, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A dating rests on typology and surface finds, with radiocarbon results still pending.