Structure AD — the central building beside the pillar chamber

Structure AD anchors the early central complex at Karahan Tepe and is the central and largest unit of the round-plan group. It is a building nearly rectangular with rounded corners — not the tidy ellipse of popular writing — its western half cut several metres into the bedrock, the pillars standing to roughly 4–4.5 m. An earlier Taş Tepeler project page reported the wall as divided by 16 pillars; Karul's 2025 report (below) refines this to about 17 along the wall and 20 in all, with two monumental central pillars, now collapsed, seated opposite each other in shallow beds. Along and between the pillars run two-step benches, and two deep pits are cut into the floor. As with its neighbours the building was closed deliberately: broken sculptures and stone objects left on the benches appear intentionally placed, and the filling layers slope from the periphery toward the centre — read as conscious demolition and backfilling rather than gradual silting.

AD does not stand alone. A narrow porthole-like opening connects it to Structure AB, the sunken chamber of phallic pillars and the watching head next door — so the two rooms were designed as a linked pair, movement passing between them through the small carved passage. The opening is more than a doorway: excavators note it could have routed liquid from AB into one of AD's floor pits, tying the two rooms into a single hydraulic and ceremonial sequence.

The 2025 excavation chapter (Karul, in The Neolithic in Türkiye) gives the most detailed description of AD published so far, and it refines the older figures. At its first construction the building was close to 28 m across, with rounded corners; its western side was cut about 5 m down into the bedrock, and the rest was raised in stone walls following the slope. The walls — only about 40–50 cm thick — were rebuilt three times, each new face set just in front of the old one, so that the interior diameter shrank to roughly 18 m in the final phase. The pillars were lifted out and reset into each new wall as it was built.

In that last phase about 17 T-shaped pillars stood along the wall, with one more on a bench — 20 in all — and two taller central pillars, each around 5.5 m, faced each other in shallow beds cut into the rock. Two-step benches ran around the interior, divided by the pillars into about 15 niche-like chambers of 2–4 m. The furnishing was not uniform: the southern chamber held a human head set in a niche, with paws carved as if gripping it from above; the northern chamber used a reused pillar laid flat, carved with an animal head and a leopard-skin relief, as a step. Human and animal statues — most of them deliberately broken — were left across the floor, and two pits were cut into the bedrock, one of which held a few human bones, hinting at burial. The whole building was then filled in and closed.

Everything in that paragraph is reported excavation detail. What those rooms, statues and benches meant — who sat where, what was performed — is interpretation, and Karul offers it as such.

It is easy to let Structure AB, with its forest of pillars and its carved head, absorb all the attention. But AB opens into AD, and reading them together changes the picture: the celebrated chamber was one room in a larger, deliberately arranged complex. The benches, pillars and floor pits of AD, and the placed broken objects sealed in its final fill, show the same vocabulary of furnished interiors and ceremonial closure seen across the central group.

That the two rooms are joined by a porthole is one of the clearest architectural statements at the site — a built connection that turns two chambers into a single staged sequence.

With the 2025 report, AD's dimensions, its three wall-rebuilds and its pillar count are now published (above), not awaited. What is not yet fully settled is how AD's sequence of use and closure lined up in time with AB and BF next door, and the complete stratigraphy of a building still only partly dug — Karahan Tepe has only been excavated since 2019.

The honest division holds here too: the architecture, the porthole link and the closing fill are reported; any account of the rites those spaces staged is interpretation offered by the excavators, not a demonstrated fact.

Press and enthusiast coverage regularly calls AD the “Great Ellipse,” an elliptical building roughly 23 × 20 m with about eighteen T-shaped pillars set into its wall and bedrock, paired with the “Pillars Shrine” (AB) through the porthole. That picture is consistent with the excavator's account of a large central building linked to AB, but the round figures — the exact ellipse dimensions and the pillar count — come from secondary reporting, not from Karul's peer-reviewed text. Karul's own 2021 description is in fact of a building nearly rectangular with rounded corners, and the official project page counts 16 wall pillars rather than eighteen — so the neat 'ellipse / 23 × 20 m / 18 pillars' formula is best read as popular shorthand, refined by the excavator's own figures. This page adopts the building and the porthole link as reported, and treats the “Great Ellipse / 23 × 20 m / 18 pillars” formula as superseded by Karul's own 2025 figures — a building about 28 m across, reduced to ~18 m, with roughly 20 pillars in all.