Northern burials — skulls with skeletal remains

In the 2025 season the Sefertepe team reported a context a few metres to the north of the skull room containing seven individuals whose skulls remained attached to their skeletal remains — bodies buried whole and left undisturbed. This is reported field material announced at the project's fifth-anniversary briefing, not yet a peer-reviewed report, and reporting of the exact room, cell or locus is imprecise.

The contrast is the point. In the nearby skull room, crania were separated from bodies and gathered together — most lacking their lower jaws, with no other bones present — a pattern that points to deliberate selection. A short distance north, the same community buried its dead intact. One site, at the same broad time, treated its dead in two opposite ways.

That contrast rules out the easy explanations — this is neither a uniform cemetery nor the aftermath of a massacre — and leaves a genuine open question: who was chosen for each rite, and why. On present evidence no one can yet say. It is also not yet settled how the northern burials relate stratigraphically to the skull chambers, or whether any of these crania carry the cut marks or perforations reported for the Göbekli Tepe skull material.