Karahan TepeResearch & Archive
Karahan TepeResearch & Archive
The Archive
Every new find from Karahan Tepe and the wider Taş Tepeler region — statues, carved pillars, the world's oldest staircase and more — tracked as it happens, and reported straight.
Latest
A 70 cm statue found in the 2026 season shows a person on a leopard's back — an unprecedented composition, and the exact reverse of an earlier Karahan sculpture.
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A room in Structure BH was capped with stone slabs and closed in antiquity. This season, archaeologists plan to lift the stones and enter from above — for the first time in ~12,000 years.
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A platform of carved human faces and a double-faced bead at Sefer Tepe widen the symbolic world shared across Karahan Tepe and the Stone Hills.
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A small stone staircase at Karahan Tepe is quietly reshaping how we think about the earliest architecture on Earth — architecture that begins not with shelter, but with intention.
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A ~17 m circular building with three tiered stone benches, human heads carved into its walls and seated statues on the floor — a Neolithic place built for people to gather.
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A vessel within a vessel, holding three tiny animals — fox, vulture, boar — that Necmi Karul reads as one of the first stories ever staged in three dimensions.
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More than 30 Neolithic homes — hearths, grinding stones, and standing stones inside them — reframe the sanctuary as one of the world's first villages.
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In one building, selected predator parts — a fox paw and pelt, wolf jaws, vulture wings, leopard bone — were laid in red fill with some fifty chlorite vessels. Not rubbish: a deliberate offering.
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The bare grey stone you see today was once painted. Traces of pigment show these chambers and carvings were coloured — a very different place to stand inside.
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Karahan Tepe's 2.3 m "Corpse Statue" — ribs, a V-collar, hands at the groin and traces of paint — found on a bench beside a vulture. One of the oldest realistic human sculptures on Earth.
Read More →We track every new find from Karahan Tepe and the Taş Tepeler region and report it straight — evidence first, interpretation flagged as interpretation. Every story here opens a full article in the archive.
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