Sefertepe

Sefertepe in depth

An eastern Taş Tepeler site

Sefertepe is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in the Viranşehir district east of Şanlıurfa — one of the easternmost of the Taş Tepeler sites — excavated by Assoc. Prof. Emre Güldoğan of Istanbul University (under the wider project coordinated by Necmi Karul). The 2025 season was its fifth, tracing a single expanding architectural complex, and much of what is known still comes from field reporting rather than final publication.

Like the other sites of the group, it combines standing stones, carved imagery and a marked concern with the human head — but in a distinctly local style.

Faces in a local style

Sefertepe's signature is the human face. In 2025 the team found a limestone block carrying two carved faces — one in high relief, one shallow and almost spectral — set at the corners of a low stone platform, worked in a manner unlike anything at Göbekli Tepe or Karahan Tepe. Smaller and stranger is a pebble-sized bead micro-carved with a human face on each of its two sides (reported variously as black basalt or serpentinite).

Beads are the site's most common find, and some are made of jade and labradorite carried in from far away — evidence that this small community was tied into a long-distance exchange network. A rare carving of a baby wild boar has also been reported.

The skull room

Sefertepe is best known for a 'skull room', where human skulls were gathered and given a status apart from the rest of the body — most kept without their jaws or any other bones. Reported counts have varied across seasons and outlets (figures of 22, 31 and further 2025 finds have all appeared), so the exact total is best treated as still being worked out.

Study by the anthropologist Prof. Yılmaz Selim Erdal (Hacettepe University) found the skulls ranged from infants to adults of about forty — pointing to a practice carried on over many generations, not a single catastrophe.

More than one way with the dead

Just north of the skull room, by contrast, seven skulls were found still joined to their skeletons — a reminder that these people treated their dead in more than one way. Some bodies were left whole; other heads were separated, curated and gathered together, a distinction that must have carried real meaning for the community.

The skulls are dated older than 10,500 years, while the carved faces and the face bead belong to a later Pre-Pottery Neolithic B phase, about 8,500 years ago — so the concern with the human head at Sefertepe ran across a very long stretch of time.

The buildings, season by season

Behind the striking objects is a slowly emerging plan. Across its seasons the excavation has traced a single expanding architectural complex — a group of quadrangular special buildings — rather than a scatter of unrelated structures. One building shows the bedrock deliberately levelled and pits cut into it, the kind of planned, prepared design that signals a space made for more than shelter.

T-shaped stelae stand within these buildings, marking Sefertepe as part of the wider pillar tradition, even as its carved faces and building forms keep a character all its own.

Chronology and what's uncertain

Because the site is under active excavation and its key finds are known mainly from season reports, the details — how the skull room was used, how the faces relate to the buildings, the exact dates and counts — should be treated as provisional until the full study appears.

What is firm is the pattern: a small settlement with its own carved faces, a long-lived skull ritual, standing stelae, and links, through its beads, to a wider Neolithic world.