The Research Archive
The deepest independent archive for Karahan Tepe — every excavated structure, every deep dive, the cross-site connections, the open questions, and the sources behind every claim. Go as far down as your curiosity takes you.
Most guides to Karahan Tepe stop at a paragraph. This archive is built to keep going. Below is the full excavated site, structure by structure, each linking to a dossier — then the deep dives, the patterns that connect Karahan to the wider Neolithic world, and the questions still open at the edge of what's known.
Nine buildings have been excavated and reported at Karahan Tepe. Each row links to its full page. Dimensions and features follow the published record (chiefly Karul 2021 and later Taş Tepeler reporting); where loci, phases, or 2025 details are still open, we mark them as such on the dossier itself.
| Structure | What it is | Key facts |
|---|---|---|
| AB | The Pillar Room — the famous chamber: descent stairs, a carved human head, phallic pillars, a serpentine channel, deliberate fill. | ~7 × 6 m, ~3.5 m deep · 11 pillars · carved head |
| AD | The large central communal building — two-step benches, wall and paired central pillars, deep pits, deliberate closure. | ~23 m internal diameter · one of the largest PPN buildings |
| AA | The shallow Pit Room — a long west bench, steps, small pits, a snake engraving, a fox beneath the stairs, a niche. | ~8.5 × 7 m · snake + fox reliefs · fill-cover evidence |
| AC | A small covered bedrock structure ~20 m northeast of the AA/AB/AD complex; boundary defined, inner fill not yet fully published. | ~5.5 m diameter · capped with large flat stones |
| AO | A small room around AD with a stone-paved floor, grinding stones, a body-shaped grinding tool, and a floor slab carved with a running wild donkey. | Domestic unit by AD · running-donkey slab |
| AZ | A domestic building on the Western Terrace — stone paving, plastered benches, grinding stones, T-pillars, and a human-faced T-pillar. | Western Terrace · human-faced pillar (2025) |
| BD | A large rectangular Western Terrace building — continuous benches, twelve T-shaped pillars, four collapsed central pillars, sculpture links under review. | Monumental rectangular plan · 12 T-pillars |
| BF | A small special building beside AD — T-pillars, stone vessels and plates, animal figurines (the "earliest 3-D scene"), selected animal remains, burned skulls, fire features. | Beside AD · nested-vessel figurines · curated bone |
| BH | The best-preserved late-phase building beside BD — high walls, two-tier benches, broken T-pillars, burning traces, and a north-wall vessel-and-channel. | ~9 × 7 m · walls to ~3.5 m · bowl-and-channel |
Long-form investigations into the finds and features that shallower guides skip — each evidence-led, with interpretation kept clearly separate from fact.
Karahan Tepe does not stand alone. These threads trace its motifs outward across the Taş Tepeler and the wider Near East — the kind of synthesis a serious reader is really after.
An honest archive is as clear about its gaps as its facts. Every structure carries unresolved questions — exact ritual functions, the liquids in the channels, phase sequences, object metadata still to be published. We keep them in one place.
Read the Open Questions register →
This archive is a synthesis of the published excavation record — chiefly Prof. Necmi Karul's 2021 Buried Buildings at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Karahantepe and subsequent Taş Tepeler reporting — cross-checked against a structured internal fact registry. We separate three things at all times: what is documented, what is interpretation, and what remains an open question. We do not present interpretation as fact, and we do not decode the site's meaning beyond what the evidence supports.
See the full sources & bibliography →
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