Söğüt Tarlası

Söğüt Tarlası in context

A site from the founding survey

Söğüt Tarlası — more fully Söğüt Tarlası–Biris Mezarlığı — lies about 32 km northwest of Şanlıurfa, near Bozova. It was first recorded in 1963 during the landmark survey of Halet Çambel and Robert Braidwood, the joint Istanbul–Chicago prehistoric project that also first noted Göbekli Tepe, and a small excavation the following year revealed two horizons: a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlement and a much later Uruk-period (fourth-millennium-BC) presence.

It is one of the region's less famous sites, but it is far from empty — and its record corrects a common assumption.

A settlement of tool-makers, not a sanctuary

Unlike the great T-pillar sites, Söğüt Tarlası reads as an early settlement of tool-makers and farmers. Its finds are pestles (some with modelled heads), greenstone axes, grooved stone smoothers, limestone cups and grinding stones, with older Palaeolithic tools mixed in — a material culture paralleled at Hallan Çemi, Körtik Tepe, Çayönü and Urfa's Yeni Mahalle. No T-shaped pillars or monumental carvings are recorded here.

New excavations resumed in 2022 under the Taş Tepeler programme, run by the Şanlıurfa Museum with the University of Tuscia.

Why it matters

The value of Söğüt Tarlası is its depth in time. Its deposits stack from the Palaeolithic through the Neolithic and into the fourth millennium BC, so the site is prized less for monuments than for its long human story and its early links between this region and southern Mesopotamia. Together with its neighbours it also shows how densely this landscape was occupied at the dawn of settled life — the Taş Tepeler world was a whole inhabited region, not a handful of spectacular hills.