Table of Contents
The Minds Behind the Discoveries
Long before visitors arrive at sites like Çatalhöyük or Karahantepe, archaeologists have already spent years uncovering, documenting, and interpreting what lies beneath.
These places do not speak for themselves. It is through the work of dedicated scientists that fragments of stone, soil, and structure become meaningful narratives about early human life.
Across Anatolia, a new generation of researchers is reshaping prehistoric studies. Figures like Mehmet Özdoğan, Ali Umut Türkcan, and Necmi Karul are not only leading excavations but redefining how we understand the Neolithic world.
Their work moves beyond discovery, focusing on questions of social structure, symbolism, and the origins of settled life, turning isolated findings into a broader civilizational story.
Mehmet Özdoğan: Pioneer of Prehistoric Thrace
The work of Mehmet Özdoğan has been fundamental in placing northwestern Anatolia and Thrace on the archaeological map. At a time when attention was largely focused elsewhere, he helped demonstrate that this region played a key role in the development and spread of early farming communities and settled life.
His research at sites such as Aşağı Pınar and Yarımburgaz Cave revealed long cultural sequences linking Anatolia with the Balkans. More importantly, his work established a broader framework, showing that prehistoric Anatolia was not peripheral, but central to the story of early human settlement and cultural transformation.
Ali Umut Türkcan: Interpreting Neolithic Life
The work of Ali Umut Türkcan bridges excavation with interpretation, making him a key figure in understanding the intellectual and symbolic depth of the Neolithic world. His long involvement with Çatalhöyük places him at the center of one of the most important archaeological debates on early settled communities.
Beyond this, his research at Kanlıtaş Höyük highlights production, specialization, and regional variation within prehistoric Anatolia. By connecting fieldwork with broader questions of ritual, symbolism, and social structure, Türkcan helps transform isolated discoveries into a more complete understanding of how early societies functioned and evolved.
Necmi Karul: Shaping the Taş Tepeler Vision
Necmi Karul has become one of the defining figures in Turkey’s current prehistoric research, closely associated with the rise of Karahantepe. His work has been central in demonstrating that this site is not merely an extension of Göbekli Tepe, but a complex and independent center with its own architectural and symbolic identity.
Beyond excavation, Karul plays a key role in developing the broader Taş Tepeler framework. This regional approach connects multiple sites across Şanlıurfa, allowing archaeologists to study early communities in relation to one another.
His contributions are helping shift the narrative from isolated discoveries to a more integrated understanding of early sedentary life and social organization.
Fatma Şahin: Tracing the Earliest Settlements
Fatma Şahin is closely associated with the excavation of Çakmaktepe, one of the most significant sites for understanding the earliest stages of settled life in Anatolia. Her work focuses on a period that sits at the very threshold between mobile hunter-gatherer groups and permanent communities.
What makes her contribution especially important is the emphasis on process rather than spectacle. At Çakmaktepe, the evidence points to an early form of sedentism, where communities were beginning to organize space, build collectively, and establish social structures.
Through this work, Şahin helps illuminate how settlement itself first emerged, offering insight into one of the most critical transitions in human history.
Eylem Özdoğan: Reading Neolithic Symbolism
Eylem Özdoğan is a central figure in interpreting the symbolic and visual world of the Neolithic period, particularly through her association with Sayburç. Her work has helped bring attention to how early communities expressed meaning not only through architecture, but also through imagery and narrative composition.
The reliefs discovered at Sayburç are among the most striking examples of early representational scenes in Anatolia. In this context, Özdoğan’s contribution lies in situating these findings within broader questions of ritual behavior, social memory, and symbolic communication.
Her research highlights that Neolithic societies were not only building structures, but also constructing complex systems of meaning and visual storytelling.
Emre Güldoğan: Expanding Sefertepe Narrative
Emre Güldoğan is closely associated with the excavation of Sefertepe, an important site within the broader Taş Tepeler landscape. His work contributes to a growing body of evidence that shows the region was not a single cultural expression, but a network of distinct communities with varying architectural and social patterns.
At Sefertepe, findings such as structured building remains and sculptural elements point to a complex settlement system during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period.
Güldoğan’s contribution lies in situating these discoveries within the wider regional framework, helping clarify how different sites in Şanlıurfa interacted and developed alongside one another during the earliest phases of sedentary life.
Why Travelers Should Care
At The Other Tour, the value of Turkey lies not only in its imperial landmarks, but in what precedes them by millennia. Beneath the well-known layers of Byzantine, Roman, Hittite, and Ottoman history, there is a far older world where communities first began to settle, build, and define shared life. This is where the foundations of human society were tested in their earliest form.
Seen through this lens, Turkey is not only a corridor of civilizations, but one of the primary workshops of early humanity. And through the work of archaeologists such as Mehmet Özdoğan, Ali Umut Türkcan, Necmi Karul, Fatma Şahin, Eylem Özdoğan, and Emre Güldoğan, that workshop is gradually becoming clearer, more structured, and far more human in its detail.
Honorable Mentions
The story of prehistoric Anatolia is not written by site directors alone. Behind every reassessed timeline and every reassembled pillar is a wider community of scholars and conservators whose patient, often invisible work makes the headline discoveries legible in the first place. Two names deserve a place in any serious account of how Türkiye‘s deep past is being rewritten.
Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal: The Bones Beneath the Stones
A human bioarchaeologist at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal has spent his career reading prehistoric Anatolia through what its people left behind in their own bones. He has taken part in more than thirty excavations across the country, and his laboratory has become one of the central nodes where archaeology, anthropology, and ancient genomics meet.
His work pushes the conversation past architecture and into the lives of the people who built it. At Çatalhöyük, his team’s analysis of 131 paleogenomes from the East Mound (c. 7100–5950 BCE) found no evidence of the patrilocal kinship patterns long assumed for Neolithic societies, and documented funerary practices in which female subadults received notably more grave goods — a quiet but significant reframing of gender and social structure in one of humanity’s earliest large settlements.
At Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin, his genomic study revealed a community carrying mixed ancestry from both the western and eastern Fertile Crescent, with active inflows of newcomers, replacing older static models with a far more mobile and connected portrait. More recently, his ongoing study of the 10,500-year-old skulls from Sefertepe is opening a new window onto Neolithic ritual life in the same Taş Tepeler landscape that surrounds Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe.
If the sites featured above tell us that prehistoric Anatolia was extraordinary, Erdal’s bioarchaeology is doing much of the work to tell us who lived there, how they were related, and how they treated one another in life and in death.
Murat Akman: The Hands That Hold the Stones Together
If the archaeologists in this article have rewritten what we know about prehistoric Anatolia, Murat Akman is the one making sure the evidence is still standing for the rest of us to read. Akman is the archaeologist-restorer behind some of the most consequential conservation work in the region — and one of the few people who can credibly say he was there when Göbeklitepe was first recognized.
In 1994, Akman walked onto the hilltop south of Şanlıurfa with Klaus Schmidt and Michael Morsch on the survey day that would change archaeology. They had just come from Nevalı Çori, the nearby Neolithic settlement whose cult building, with its T-shaped pillars and human-armed reliefs, had already given them the visual vocabulary they needed. “We transferred our knowledge from Nevalı Çori to here,” Akman has said.
“We saw the T-shapes and said — this is it.”
But Nevalı Çori itself was running out of time. As the waters behind the Atatürk Dam rose in 1992, Akman documented the cult building, numbered and prepared its massive limestone blocks, and organized their rescue and transport to the Şanlıurfa Museum. The stones then sat in the museum courtyard for twenty-four years. When the new Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum was finally completed, Akman reassembled the cult building inside it, largely by hand and largely from memory — an act of architectural recall almost without precedent in Turkish archaeology.
Today, under the Taş Tepeler framework led by Prof. Dr. Necmi Karul, Akman heads the restoration team at Göbeklitepe itself, focused on Structures C and D. Working with soil sieved from the site, local gravel, and goat hair — a mortar nearly identical to what the original Neolithic builders used — his team is stabilizing dry-stone walls that had nothing left between the stones, and re-erecting fallen T-shaped pillars, including one standing roughly 5.20 meters tall. The technique is anastylosis: reassembly using original materials, with new stone deliberately distinguishable from ancient, so that future generations can always tell what was found and what was restored. Alongside this, Akman is training six younger restorers on-site, transferring decades of accumulated craft directly into the next generation working at Göbeklitepe, Karahantepe, and Sayburç.
It is a strange feature of contemporary archaeology that a figure of Akman’s stature has almost no public profile. No personal website, no lecture circuit. Just thirty-plus years of fieldwork, from a Neolithic cult building rescued from a rising reservoir to the world’s oldest monumental sanctuary being raised back to its feet, one stone at a time.
Ümit Işın: Archaeologist/Tour Guide
Let’s not forget our very own Ümit Işın — a living legend among Turkish tour guides, and one of the rare figures who bridges professional guiding, archaeology, public education, and digital storytelling with such natural authority.
A licensed tour guide and archaeology popularizer, Ümit Işın has played an important role in bringing Turkey’s ancient past to a much wider audience, especially through his TRT2 programs and his ongoing digital content. His work makes archaeology feel alive, approachable, and relevant — not only for travelers, but also for the Turkish public and even for fellow guides.
And yes, you can book Ümit Işın through The Other Tour for private, deeply informed cultural journeys across Turkey.
We also want to thank some of our other top-tier guides who continue to raise the bar in the profession. Ahmet Faik Özbilge, for example, regularly organizes seminars and talks on historical themes such as Byzantine heritage and the works of Mimar Sinan.
Ebru Gökteke prepares in-depth lectures — including three-hour sessions on Chora Church — that other professional guides attend, listen to, and learn from.
This is the kind of guide culture we believe in: not just people who repeat information, but people who study, teach, share, and help keep Turkey’s layered history alive.
Explore Ancient Cities With Us
Ancient Anatolia is not a story to be read from a distance. It is a landscape that needs to be experienced on the ground, where every site carries layers of human presence stretching back thousands of years. From early Neolithic settlements to later classical cities, each location reveals a different phase of how people lived, built, and understood the world.
If you want to move beyond standard routes and engage with these places in a more meaningful way, get in touch with us at The Other Tour. We can help you explore Turkey’s ancient landscapes through carefully designed experiences that connect history, archaeology, and travel in a direct and informed way.
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Fantastic piece. But let’s also not forget Murat Akman’s extraordinary practical role in all this. He was not only there from the very beginning, but he also helped move Nevalı Çori to the Şanlıurfa Museum piece by piece, and now he is doing crucial work strengthening and restoring the walls and pillars of Göbeklitepe itself. People often talk about the archaeologists who interpret these sites, but figures like Akman are just as vital — without them, much of this heritage might quite literally not still be standing.
Thank you very much for this excellent comment. We completely agree — Murat Akman deserves far more recognition than he usually receives.
As a matter of fact, a special article on Murat Akman is already on the way from us.
And until that is published, this video is a wonderful introduction to his work for anyone interested in the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj9Z_444bd4
Many thanks again for helping highlight such an important name.