Small finds and symbolic objects

A site-level assemblage

This entry groups Sefertepe's portable finds rather than a single building. Until exact findspots, catalogue numbers and figure-level detail are published, the objects are best read together as a site-level assemblage. Almost all of it is reported from the 2024–2025 seasons — announced at project briefings and in interviews with excavation director Emre Güldoğan — rather than set out in a peer-reviewed report.

Beads and the double-faced bead

Beads are the dominant symbolic small-find group at Sefertepe. The standout of the 2025 season is a tiny double-faced bead, only a few centimetres across, carved with a human face on each side — micro-carving that is rare for the early Neolithic; reporting describes the material as a dark stone (variously given as black basalt or serpentinite). Other beads are reported in jade, labradorite and limestone, some shaped like snake heads. Because jade and labradorite are not local, the excavators read them as evidence that Sefertepe was tied into wider exchange networks — a reasonable inference that provenance study would need to confirm.

Figurines, worked stone and tools

The reported assemblage also includes a leopard figurine and, from earlier reporting, jade ornaments described as a leopard and a vulture-with-human-figure; a juvenile wild-boar image on a heavily used grinding stone; and a worked limestone object bearing thirteen circles on each face, whose purpose is unknown. Lithic, ground-stone and bone tools round out the everyday-work material. Findspots and catalogue metadata for several of these objects remain open, and some may be superseded by the excavation's own figures.