Structure AZ — the room of the human-faced pillar

Structure AZ is reported as a domestic building with a stone-paved floor and plastered benches, in which grinding stones were recovered — and, above all, as the setting for a T-shaped pillar carved with a human face. Four T-pillars were expected in the building; three survived, and one bears a human face on its front surface, with the arms worked down the shaft. It belongs to the same central sculptural world as the other lettered buildings, where the boundary between an upright pillar and a standing human figure is deliberately blurred.

Very little about AZ has been formally published. The 'AZ' label, the room's plan and dimensions, the pillar's exact findspot, and the building's function are all reporting-grade, drawn from field-stage accounts of a site excavated only since 2019.

The interest of AZ is what it says about the wider tradition. At Göbekli Tepe the great central pillars are stylised human bodies — arms, hands and belts carved on a faceless T-stone. At Karahan the same idea is pushed further, with faces added, and with fully carved standing statues found in the buildings. The AZ pillar sits on that spectrum, between the abstract T-stone and the realistic human statue.

That is why the room matters even while thinly documented: it is another data point for how these communities turned stone uprights into persons.

Karul's 2025 excavation report puts the AZ pillar in published company. Karul records a human face carved directly onto a pillar (his Fig. 22) and draws the point AZ makes — that the human figure at Karahan was used not only in freestanding statues but as a permanent, structural part of the architecture itself. He also describes the four-pillar rooms of the later phase (structures AH and AE), where the T-pillars carry arm reliefs that bend at the elbow and end in eight fingers, the upper arm shaped like a vulture's head, with a V-relief at the neck — exactly the repertoire the AZ pillar belongs to.

The human-faced pillar itself, and the wider habit of carving faces and arms onto standing stones, are now published in Karul's report. What stays open is the room-level detail: how 'AZ' relates in plan and time to the central group, whether its human-faced pillar stood as a central stone or against a wall, and what the added face was meant to signify. The pillar and its human features are the fact; any account of the room's purpose is a lead for future work.

The objects recorded for this building, gathered as one catalogue. Where a full object page exists, it is linked from the card.