Most travelers reach Şanlıurfa chasing one name: Göbeklitepe. Taş Tepeler, the “Stone Hills” project linking it to eleven more Neolithic sites across the same plateau, is the story that explains all of them.
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What Taş Tepeler Really Means
Taş Tepeler is the working name for the Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project, a survey and excavation program covering settlements, campsites, and hunting grounds from the tenth to the seventh millennium BC.
Rather than digging one mound and moving on, the project maps the whole plateau. Researchers place every ridge and depression in the same regional and chronological frame, so a dozen separate curiosities read instead as one connected story.
The project runs under Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, coordinated by archaeologist Necmi Karul of Istanbul University, with Turkish Airlines as its main sponsor. Funding also covers paleoenvironmental research into what this now-arid plateau looked like when it was cooler and wetter.
A World Before Farming Began
Every site inside Taş Tepeler belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, the centuries after humans began raising permanent, monumental structures but before they had pottery, metal tools, or, in most cases, farming itself.
Archaeologists spent most of the twentieth century assuming organized religion and monumental building followed settled farming life.
Taş Tepeler flipped the sequence: its builders were still hunting wild game and harvesting wild cereals when they carved and raised the first T-shaped pillars.
Walk the site with a knowledgeable guide who knows the sequence, and the point lands physically: you’re standing among the first religious architecture ever built, raised by people who had not yet sown a crop.
The builders of the Stone Hills raised temples before they planted a single field, hunted their feasts, and carved their gods, and they left no writing to explain why.
The sites share a visual language too vivid to miss once you’ve seen it twice. T-shaped stone pillars, carved with foxes, boars, snakes, and vultures shown with bared teeth and open claws, recur from mound to mound.
A strikingly consistent human figure recurs too: collared, faceless, gripping its own body.
It appears at more than one site across the plateau. Communities shared this symbolic vocabulary long before any of them had writing to record it.
Site by Site Across the Plateau
No two Taş Tepeler sites tell quite the same story. Some are famous, a handful of specialists are still excavating others, and a few barely have English names yet.
Göbeklitepe: Where the Search Began
Göbeklitepe is the site that made this whole plateau worth searching. A 1963 survey noted the mound and dismissed it as a probable Byzantine cemetery; German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt did not excavate it properly until 1995.
What he found became the first hard proof that hunter-gatherers could organize monumental labour millennia before agriculture: circular enclosures built around T-shaped limestone pillars, some over five metres tall and weighing up to twenty tons.
Göbeklitepe stayed in active use for roughly 1500 years before its builders deliberately buried it around 8000 BC, for reasons still debated.
It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018 and remains the plateau’s most visited site. Its fame is the reason neighbouring mounds eventually got a proper look too.
Prehistoric Turkey
The Site Behind the Project
Before Necmi Karul could read Karahantepe, a generation of archaeologists had to learn to recognize T-shaped pillars in the field at all. That knowledge was assembled at Çayönü — a site that sits just outside the twelve official mounds.
Karahantepe: The Independent Twin
Early reports treated Karahantepe as an extension of Göbeklitepe, the two sites close enough on the map to blur together. Excavations led by archaeologist Necmi Karul since 2019 prove otherwise.
Karahantepe has its own architectural signature: chambers cut directly into the bedrock, and a room lined with dozens of phallic pillars and serpent reliefs carved from the living rock rather than freestanding stone.
Recent seasons have produced some of the plateau’s most striking single finds, including what excavators describe as the largest human statue and the first painted animal figure yet recovered from the period.
Excavators have uncovered only a fraction of Karahantepe so far. That incompleteness is part of why the site now draws almost as much attention as Göbeklitepe itself.
Sayburç: A Story Carved in Stone
Sayburç‘s most important find is a relief carved into a bench wall, in what was once a domestic courtyard inside a village people still live in today. That relief shows a human figure flanked by two leopards, alongside a second scene of a man confronting a bull.
It is one of the earliest known examples of narrative storytelling carved into stone, rather than a single isolated symbol. Archaeologist Eylem Özdoğan, who published the find, showed these are sequential scenes with beginnings, middles, and implied endings, not isolated religious icons.
Stand in front of that bench wall and a guide can walk you through the scene panel by panel, the same way you’d read a comic strip carved eleven thousand years before comics existed.
Your Private Guide
Elif Ünal: Your Archaeology Guide
Knowing which sites are accessible this season, how the symbolic vocabulary connects mound to mound, and what the excavators found last summer, that’s the difference a specialist guide makes on this plateau.
Sefertepe: Between Two Rivers
Archaeologist Emre Güldoğan excavates Sefertepe, a site positioned between two watercourses. That position between rivers is the detail behind its official tagline.
Its structured buildings and carved fragments point to a settlement pattern distinct from its more famous neighbours.
Walk between the exposed foundations and you can trace individual room walls at ankle height, small evidence that the plateau’s Neolithic world was a network of related but independent communities, not one culture radiating outward from a single centre.
Sefertepe has also become a focus of bioarchaeology. Researchers at Hacettepe University are currently studying a cluster of roughly ten-thousand-five-hundred-year-old skulls recovered there, part of a broader pattern of skull treatment and ancestor ritual that teams are now tracing across several Taş Tepeler sites at once.
Çakmaktepe: Hunting the Gazelle
Çakmaktepe is the plateau’s earliest, rawest phase. It is the threshold where mobile hunter-gatherer bands first began organizing themselves into something more permanent. Excavator Fatma Şahin‘s team has linked the site to nearby desert kites, vast funnel-shaped drystone traps built to drive and corner herds of wild gazelle.
Some of these traps run for hundreds of metres. Researchers now read them as early evidence of coordinated, large-scale hunting at the very moment communities were starting to settle down. That timing is the proof: organized labour on the plateau began with the hunt, well before it moved to farming or monument-building.
Yeni Mahalle & the Urfa Man
Yeni Mahalle produced the single most famous object connected to the entire Taş Tepeler network, the Urfa Man, recovered from what was once a lakeshore inside modern Şanlıurfa.
This life-size limestone statue is roughly eleven thousand years old, with obsidian-inlaid eyes and hands folded over its own body. Researchers widely describe it as the oldest known naturalistic statue of a human being.
Urfa Man now stands in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, a short drive from the construction site where workers dug him up in 1993. Seeing Taş Tepeler properly means splitting your time between the excavation sites and the museum halls where the finest objects actually live.
Harbetsuvan Tepesi: The Hilltop Watch
Harbetsuvan Tepesi occupies the highest point in its immediate surroundings. Researchers nicknamed it the plateau’s Neolithic acropolis, and standing at the summit, you can see why: ridge after ridge of the surrounding terrain spreads out below, visible in a way no valley site can match.
Its T-shaped pillars and phallic statuary place it firmly within the same symbolic world as Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe, even though it remains one of the network’s least-excavated members. That visibility looks deliberate. Some communities appear to have chosen locations for how many neighbouring ridges could see their monuments, not just for shelter or water.
Gürcütepe: Where Farming Began
Gürcütepe belongs to a later chapter than most of its neighbours. It marks the point where the plateau’s hunter-gatherer builders gave way to genuine farming communities. Its official tagline, “predecessors of the farmers,” captures the site’s role: a hinge between Göbeklitepe‘s ritual-first world and the agricultural villages that eventually replaced it.
Walk its trenches and the shift is visible in the ground itself, in the charred grain and grindstones that never appear at the older ritual sites.
Read alongside the earlier sites, Gürcütepe completes the arc Taş Tepeler is documenting: hunting gave way to monument building, and monument building gave way to farming, in that order rather than the sequence textbooks assumed for most of the twentieth century.
Nevalı Çori & Ayanlar Höyük
Nevalı Çori predates the Taş Tepeler project by decades, and it no longer exists above water. As the Atatürk Dam reservoir rose in 1992, a rescue team dismantled its T-pillared cult building stone by stone.
Restorer Murat Akman later reassembled it inside the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum. It was at Nevalı Çori that archaeologists first learned to recognize T-shaped pillars in the field. That exact knowledge let Akman and Klaus Schmidt identify Göbeklitepe for what it was in 1994.
Ayanlar Höyük is the newest formal addition to the network. Japan’s Princess Akiko Mikasa helped launch its excavation, expanding the coordinated project to a full twelve sites.
Its stone vessels, decorated plates, and grindstones capture daily domestic life rather than ritual grandeur. Where Göbeklitepe raised pillars to the unknown, Ayanlar Höyük preserves the plainer, quieter routines of eating and storing food. Smaller sites, including Hamzan Tepe, Kurt Tepe, and Taşlı Tepe, round out the survey, and teams keep adding new mounds to the map each season.
The Archaeologists Behind the Dig
No site on this plateau interprets itself. Necmi Karul coordinates the project and leads excavations at Karahantepe; Eylem Özdoğan works Sayburç, Emre Güldoğan leads Sefertepe, and Fatma Şahin directs Çakmaktepe.
Their methods trace back to Mehmet Özdoğan, whose decades at nearby Çayönü helped establish the interdisciplinary, carefully documented excavation style every Taş Tepeler team now uses, even though Çayönü itself sits outside the twelve official sites.
Keeping any of this standing for visitors is a separate job entirely. It belongs largely to restorer Murat Akman and his team, who stabilize Göbeklitepe‘s dry-stone walls and re-erect its fallen pillars using soil, gravel, and goat-hair mortar close to what the original builders would have used.
For a fuller portrait of the people doing this work, our piece on the archaeologists rewriting prehistoric Turkey follows several of them season by season.
Planning Your Visit to Taş Tepeler
Şanlıurfa works as the natural base for exploring the whole plateau: every site in the network lies within striking distance of the city. Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe both work as practical half-day visits from there.
The Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum holds many of the finest objects, Urfa Man included, in one air-conditioned room, the natural counterpart to a morning spent on-site in the heat.
Most of the smaller sites aren’t yet set up for casual visitors, which is exactly why a knowledgeable local guide who tracks the current excavation calendar is worth having.
Current travel guidance for the country places Şanlıurfa firmly within its recommended areas, and a private driver removes any question of navigating unfamiliar roads between mounds.
Getting Between the Sites
Private Van Hire Across the Plateau
Twelve sites spread across unfamiliar plateau roads, most with no public transport and several not yet open to independent visitors. A private driver handles every transfer between mounds, so the only thing left to do is read the stones.
Good to Know Before You Go
- Base: Şanlıurfa, a short transfer from every site in the network.
- Half-day visits: Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe both work well in a morning or afternoon.
- Museum stop: The Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum holds Urfa Man and other objects pulled from the plateau.
- Best timing: Early morning, before the plateau’s midday heat sets in.
FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Explore with The Other Tour
The version of Şanlıurfa most travelers never reach, the one where a single plateau explains how humans began building for reasons beyond shelter, is the one worth crossing the country for.
The Other Tour can build a private southeastern itinerary around exactly this plateau, sequencing the sites so the story unfolds in order: from the earliest hunting camps to Göbeklitepe‘s pillars to the farming villages that followed.
Get in touch with a guide who understands the archaeology, and we’ll handle the logistics between mounds, so the only thing left for you to do is experience the stones.
