Karahan Tepe · Structure
A special-purpose building beside Structure AD at Karahan Tepe — now fully described in Karul's 2025 excavation report: ~9 × 8 m and 3 m deep, with ovens and fireplaces, and a buried chamber holding stone vessels, animal figurines and curated animal remains.
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Earlier coverage of BF was thin, and this page used to treat it as a research lead. Karul's 2025 excavation chapter now describes it in full. BF has an irregular plan about 9 × 8 m and 3 m deep, with a bedrock floor and standing stones set along its northern edge. Against the south wall stand two ovens — one about 160 × 90 × 130 cm, a smaller one about 80 × 40 × 110 cm — and two fireplaces run along the centre of the floor; the burnt marks and ash make BF, unlike the other buildings of the complex, a place where fire and food preparation clearly happened.
Its most remarkable feature is the northern chamber. Before it was sealed, a large decorated chlorite vessel was left on the floor holding three animal figurines — a vulture, a fox and a boar — their heads inserted into small stone rings, with an animal vertebra on an accompanying plate. Found in place, this set is described by the excavator as the earliest three-dimensional expression of prehistoric 'storytelling' known. Around it lay stone plates, more carved chlorite vessels, batons tipped with animal heads, and small soft-stone figurines. The animal bone from the building was itself curated: wolf jaws, leopard and vulture bones, and fox paws with the fur still on, plus three burnt bull heads set at three points, a leopard statue, and dozens of burnt gazelle horns left on the bench. The whole northern area was then covered with sterile red soil — a deliberate burial of the deposit rather than ordinary abandonment.
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Before the 2025 chapter, BF was known mainly from press coverage, which described a small public building next to Structure AD, its chamber divided by T-shaped pillars, with a central posthole, and a floor set with animal figurines, stone rings and nested stone vessels, black chlorite carved objects and plates, alongside burned cattle skulls and the bones of leopard, vulture and fox. Karul's report now carries all of that into a documented building — the ovens and fireplaces, the figurine-in-a-vessel deposit, the curated animal bone and the three burnt bull heads are published findings, not loose reports. What earlier accounts could only list, the report places in a plan.
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What remains genuinely uncertain is function and meaning, not whether the finds are real. BF mixes the signatures of a kitchen — ovens, fireplaces, grinding equipment — with those of a shrine: a deliberately buried deposit of figurines and curated animal parts. Karul reads it as a place where communal food preparation, feasting and ritual deposition met, but whether the two happened together, or in sequence, and exactly how BF's life related to the neighbouring AD, are questions the continuing excavation and full zooarchaeology will refine.
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Burnt animal-bone deposit and fire pits (2024)
Charred animal bone recorded in a Karahan Tepe deposit. Karul's 2025 report describes BF's curated bone — wolf jaws, leopard and vulture bones, and fox paws with the fur still on — together with three burnt bull heads, a concentration read as deliberate deposition rather than ordinary kitchen refuse. That the parts were chosen is reported; what the choice meant is interpretation.
AA Photo / Karahantepe excavations
Stone vessels, recorded in situ
Karul's report publishes BF's signature deposit (Figs. 8–9): a large chlorite vessel holding vulture, fox and boar figurines with their heads set into stone rings, with two batons and an animal vertebra — read as the earliest three-dimensional prehistoric ‘story’. No photograph of that deposit is available here at this time.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Full page →Stone plates (Şanlıurfa Museum)
Worked stone plates from Karahan Tepe on museum display — the sort of everyday-but-crafted objects that recur in the small buildings, and among the items reported for BF.
Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum · Wikimedia Commons
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The concentration of figurines, rings and paired vessels reads as a room set apart for something, and reporting interprets it around ritual preparation or food processing — yet whether it was storage, craft or ritual is unresolved, and at Karahan those categories blur.
In interviews Karul describes selected animal parts intentionally deposited in a Karahan context — leopard bones, vulture wings, wolf jaws, and fox paws and claws still attached to the pelt — a curated rather than casual assemblage. The interview does not pin this to BF specifically, but it resonates with the leopard-, vulture- and fox-bone material reported here; treat the connection as suggestive, not established.
Karul stresses that BF's northern chamber was filled with sterile red soil over the deposit — the figurines, vessels and animal parts sealed in on purpose. That the building was closed by an intentional act, rather than left to collapse, is one of the clearest statements of the site's burial practice; the fuller zooarchaeology will still refine counts and species.
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The objects recorded for this building, gathered as one catalogue. Where a full object page exists, it is linked from the card.
Object
Vessels Rings And Figurines
Wikimedia Commons
Full page →08
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →
Last reviewed 11 October 2026. Something wrong?