Southern residential buildings

The southern area is where Sayburç looks most like an ordinary lived-in place. Özdoğan describes it as holding residential buildings alongside several special-purpose buildings and a set of smaller, ambiguous structures, all fitted with the equipment of daily life: bedrock floors, benches, niches, hearths, storage and food-preparation areas, and grinding stones and other tools. Like the rest of the site, these buildings were made with the rock — cut where cutting was needed, filled where filling was easier — rather than imposed as a rigid plan.

What makes the area important is not any single house but the mixture. The southern buildings are where the everyday and the symbolic sit side by side: T-shaped monolithic pillars — the same kind of stone that marks out communal buildings — appear inside dwellings here, typically as a single stone per house. Structure BB, fully excavated, is the clearest example, with a central human-featured pillar standing in a domestic room.

The southern domestic buildings are also where Sayburç's mortuary evidence is concentrated: human remains showing secondary treatment — selected long bones and skull fragments, with burning in some contexts — are reported in clusters within these houses rather than in a separate cemetery. The treatment of the dead was folded into the ordinary settlement, not set apart from it.

A genuine research question hangs over the area: which of the southern buildings are houses, which are special-purpose, and which are ambiguous hybrids is not yet resolved, and a building-by-building breakdown awaits fuller, feature-level publication. The picture here is a domestic-area cluster drawn from preliminary reporting, not a finished plan of individual structures.