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Reference
The Neolithic vocabulary you’ll meet across this archive — from “Pre-Pottery Neolithic” and “T-shaped pillar” to “secondary burial” — defined plainly.
Neolithic archaeology has its own vocabulary, and the reporting around Karahan Tepe is full of it. This glossary defines the terms you’ll meet across the archive — plainly, and with the same care for the fact/interpretation line we use everywhere else.
| Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) | The early Neolithic phase before pottery was in use — the world Karahan Tepe belongs to. Broadly the 10th–9th millennia BCE in this region. |
|---|---|
| PPNA / PPNB | Sub-divisions of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (A = earlier, B = later). Karahan’s main horizon spans the PPNA–early PPNB. |
| Aceramic | “Without ceramics” — a society that had not yet made fired pottery. The absence of pottery is itself a dating clue. |
| Radiocarbon (C14) dating | Measuring the decay of carbon-14 in organic material (charcoal, bone, seeds) to estimate age. It dates the sample, not the stone — so context matters. |
| Typology | Dating and classifying a site by the forms of its tools, pillars and vessels, compared with known assemblages elsewhere. |
| Stratigraphy | The study of layers — floors, fills, rebuilds — whose sequence records relative order over time. |
| T-shaped pillar | The signature monolith of Göbekli and Karahan: an upright shaft with a broad horizontal top, widely read as a stylised human figure (head = crossbar). |
|---|---|
| Rock-cut / bedrock-cut | Carved down into the living rock rather than built up from blocks — Karahan’s defining construction method. |
| Special building / structure | The excavators’ careful term for Karahan’s buildings, preferred over “temple” because function is not settled. “Enclosure” is Göbekli’s term. |
| Terrazzo | A hard, polished lime-plaster floor surface used in some PPN buildings. |
| Relief (bas-relief) | A carving raised slightly from a flat background — e.g. the snake beside the Karahan head. |
| Backfill / deliberate fill | Intentionally filling a building with soil and stone to close it — documented at Karahan (AB, AD) and Göbekli. |
| Locus | A single defined archaeological context or spot within a dig — the unit findspots are recorded against. |
| In situ | “In place” — an object found where it was originally deposited, not moved. |
| Anthropomorphic | Human-shaped or having human features — as argued for the T-pillars, and shown outright by the 2025 human-faced pillar. |
|---|---|
| Secondary burial | A two-stage funerary practice: the body is treated first, then selected bones (often the skull) are handled or deposited later. |
| Skull cult / plastered skull | A PPN horizon of ritual attention to human skulls — curated, cut-marked, sometimes plastered — seen from Çayönü to Jericho, and echoed at Karahan. |
| Tell / höyük / tepe | Words for a settlement mound built up over generations. “Tepe” (Turkish) means hill/mound; Karahan Tepe = “black hill.” |
| Taş Tepeler | “Stone Hills” — the Ministry of Culture & Tourism programme linking Karahan, Göbekli, Sayburç and other Neolithic sites near Şanlıurfa. |
| Ribbed Man / Urfa Man | The Ribbed Man is Karahan’s ~2.3 m statue of a man; “Urfa Man” is the separate, oldest-known life-size human statue in the Şanlıurfa Museum. |
Missing a term you hit elsewhere on the site? It probably has its own page — the Atlas indexes every structure and deep dive, and Open Questions collects what these words can’t yet pin down.
Karahan Tepe Research & Archive · Definitions follow standard Neolithic usage and the excavation’s own terminology (Karul 2021; Taş Tepeler). Where a term carries interpretation (e.g. “temple,” “skull cult”), we say so.
Peer-reviewed excavation detail follows Karul 2021. Finds reported in 2024–2025 seasons are cited to project announcements and reputable coverage and are flagged as reporting-grade pending formal publication. See Sources & Method and Open Questions.
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