Guest Insight — Assoc. Prof. Yüksel İskol, Archaeologist and academic specialist in Anatolian cultural heritage.
For many years, the story of the early Neolithic in Upper Mesopotamia was told primarily through architecture. Monumental stone buildings, T-shaped pillars, carefully organised enclosures and extraordinary animal imagery transformed the way we understood communities living more than eleven thousand years ago.
Today, Karahantepe is adding another dimension to that story.
Here, the human form is becoming increasingly visible.
This does not mean that the human image was absent from Göbeklitepe. The T-shaped pillars themselves have long been interpreted as anthropomorphic forms: some carry arms, hands, belts and other elements that suggest stylised human bodies. The imagery of Göbeklitepe also belongs to a complex symbolic world in which animals and human representations appear together.
Karahantepe, however, presents the human body with a striking directness.
From Symbolic Body to Human Presence
One of the most important discoveries at Karahantepe came to public attention in 2023: an approximately 2.3-metre-high seated human figure carved from limestone.
The sculpture is remarkable not simply because of its scale. Its treatment of the body is highly deliberate. The ribs, spine and shoulders are strongly emphasised, while the hands are positioned upon the body. It was discovered fixed within a bench-like setting, in association with other finds including a vulture representation and stone objects.
We should resist the temptation to give this figure a simple identity.
It may be connected with ritual, memory, death, ancestry, social identity or ideas that do not fit comfortably within modern categories. Archaeology rarely provides a written explanation for imagery of this age.
What it does provide is context.
And at Karahantepe, that context increasingly suggests that the human body itself carried powerful meaning.
A Face Appears on the T-Shaped Pillar
The importance of human representation at Karahantepe became even more interesting with a discovery announced in 2025.
Excavations revealed a T-shaped pillar bearing a clearly rendered human face. Until this discovery, the anthropomorphic interpretation of T-shaped pillars had been supported principally by features such as arms and hands carved onto some examples. The Karahantepe discovery added a new and unusually direct element: a face incorporated into the form of the pillar itself.
This does not provide a final answer to what every T-shaped pillar represented.
It does, however, strengthen an important line of interpretation.
The monumental stones of the Taş Tepeler landscape may not have been understood simply as architectural elements. At least some appear to have embodied human or human-like identities.
This makes the relationship between architecture and image particularly important.
A building was not merely a space containing sculpture.
The pillars, benches, walls, reliefs and human forms could all have participated in the creation of a shared symbolic environment.
The Human Body as a Language
When we look at prehistoric imagery, there is always a danger of asking modern questions: Who is this person? Is this a god? Is this a ruler? Is this an ancestor?
These are natural questions, but the societies that created Karahantepe lived thousands of years before writing and before the political and religious institutions familiar from later Mesopotamian civilisation.
Their visual language belonged to a different world.
The more useful question may therefore be not who a particular figure represents, but why the human form became important enough to monumentalise.
A life-sized or larger-than-life body changes the experience of a space. It creates presence. It establishes a relationship between the viewer, the architecture and the image.
At Karahantepe, the human figure is not reduced to a small decorative motif. It can occupy the same physical world as the people who entered these spaces.
That difference matters.
Göbeklitepe and Karahantepe Should Not Be Read in Isolation
The greatest change in our understanding of this period may be the gradual disappearance of the idea that Göbeklitepe was an isolated phenomenon.
Research across the wider Taş Tepeler landscape has revealed numerous Neolithic sites with related architectural and symbolic traditions.
Recent research has also contributed to a more complex understanding of Göbeklitepe itself, increasingly placing ritual activity within the wider context of settlement, domestic life and regional interaction.
This changing interpretation is important.
Archaeology advances not because every excavation confirms what we already believe, but because new evidence forces us to reconsider earlier models.
Karahantepe is especially valuable in this respect.
It does not replace Göbeklitepe.
It gives us another perspective from which to understand the same extraordinary period of human history.
A Landscape of Communities
Taken together, Göbeklitepe, Karahantepe and the other sites of the Taş Tepeler encourage us to think at the scale of a landscape.
These were communities connected by geography, materials, architectural knowledge and elements of a shared symbolic vocabulary.
Yet they were not necessarily identical.
Different sites may have expressed different aspects of the social world.
One place might emphasise particular animals. Another might give greater prominence to the human body. Architectural forms could be shared while individual communities developed distinctive visual languages.
This combination of similarity and difference is exactly what makes the region so important.
Instead of searching for a single explanation for the Neolithic transformation, we can begin to see a network of communities experimenting with new ways of building, gathering, remembering and representing themselves.
Why Seeing the Sites Together Matters
For the modern visitor, this is also why Karahantepe should not be treated simply as an alternative to Göbeklitepe.
The two sites speak to one another.
At Göbeklitepe, monumental architecture and powerful animal imagery dominate the first impression.
At Karahantepe, the encounter with the human form can feel more immediate.
And in the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum, objects removed from their excavation contexts can be studied at close range and understood within a broader regional chronology.
Experiencing these places together creates something that no single site can provide: context.
The question is no longer merely, “How old is this?” It becomes: What kind of society created this? How did these communities understand the human body? What did they choose to remember in stone? And why, at this moment in human history, did monumental images and monumental architecture become so important?
Archaeology Is a Conversation, Not a Final Answer
Karahantepe is still an active archaeological landscape.
New discoveries will change interpretations. Some ideas that appear convincing today will be revised tomorrow. This is not a weakness of archaeology; it is the strength of the discipline.
The human figures emerging from Karahantepe do not give us a simple answer to the origins of belief, society or civilisation.
They give us something more valuable.
They allow us to see that the people who lived in Upper Mesopotamia more than eleven thousand years ago were already developing sophisticated ways of representing themselves, organising communal space and expressing ideas through architecture and imagery.
The stones are ancient.
The conversation around them is still unfolding.
And Karahantepe has become one of the most compelling places from which to listen.
Guest Insight — Assoc. Prof. Yüksel İskol
Archaeologist and academic specialist in Anatolian cultural heritage.
His work and academic interests focus on the archaeology and cultural heritage of Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia, with particular attention to the interpretation and preservation of archaeological landscapes.
