Pre-Pottery Neolithic

Karahan Tepe

Location Şanlıurfa, Turkey

Official Date c. 9400 BCE

Visited March 2024

◈ 6 Anomaly Score

Karahan Tepe is the largest known site in the Tas Tepeler landscape of southeastern Anatolia, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic complex comparable in age to Göbekli Tepe and in some respects more remarkable. Its most extraordinary feature is a partially subterranean elliptical chamber whose limestone floor has been carved with human faces emerging from the bedrock, as if the earth itself has been given a face. The T-shaped pillar tradition documented at Göbekli Tepe appears here in a different form: pillars still attached to the parent rock in the quarry, their extraction sequence frozen in mid-operation. Excavations began only in 2019 and are ongoing.

Official Attribution

Date c. 9400 BCE

Photo Gallery · 12 photos

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Aerial View Aerial view of Karahan Tepe, Şanlıurfa, Turkey

Aerial / satellite view of Karahan Tepe, Şanlıurfa, Turkey

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Astronomical Alignment

Karahan Tepe's enclosures have been subject to preliminary archaeoastronomical analysis by researchers including Giulio Magli. The site's overall orientation and the specific axis of the subterranean elliptical chamber have been connected to the same stellar targets proposed for Göbekli Tepe — particularly Sirius rising positions at the construction epoch of c. 9400 BCE. The distribution of Taş Tepeler sites across the Şanlıurfa plateau — of which Karahan Tepe is the largest after Göbekli Tepe — follows a spatial pattern that has attracted attention as a potentially planned landscape distribution rather than a random clustering, though this landscape-scale alignment argument is more contested than the individual enclosure orientations. The astronomical argument at Karahan Tepe is less firmly established than at Göbekli Tepe given the earlier stage of excavation and publication, but the preliminary evidence from the pillar orientations is consistent with the same Pre-Pottery Neolithic astronomical programme documented at the older site.

Geological Embedding

Like Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe was deliberately buried in antiquity — the excavated enclosures were filled with rubble and animal bone in the same intentional infilling programme documented at Göbekli Tepe. The site was discovered by surface survey in 1997 but systematic excavation only began in 2019, meaning the full extent of the buried complex is still being revealed. Current estimates suggest that only a fraction of the site has been excavated, with additional enclosures and structures remaining embedded in the hillside geology. The combination of deliberate ancient burial and subsequent natural geological re-integration over 11,000 years makes Karahan Tepe the second strongest Geological Embedding entry in the catalogue after Göbekli Tepe itself.

Large Monoliths

The limestone pillars of Karahan Tepe include T-shaped elements comparable in scale to the Göbekli Tepe examples — individual pillars estimated at 5–10 tons each, quarried from the limestone bedrock of the site itself rather than transported from a separate quarry. A distinctive feature of Karahan Tepe is that several pillars are partially carved while still attached to the bedrock — their lower sections remaining part of the living rock, their upper T-shaped sections carved in place before being separated from the parent stone. This in-situ quarrying method is more clearly visible at Karahan Tepe than at Göbekli Tepe and provides direct evidence of the Neolithic quarrying sequence: the pillars were carved to their final form at the quarry face, then detached and erected. The partially completed pillars still attached to the bedrock are the Karahan Tepe equivalent of the Unfinished Obelisk at Aswan — evidence of an active construction programme arrested at an intermediate stage, preserving the manufacturing process in frozen form.

Stone Circles / Henges

Karahan Tepe contains circular and oval enclosures of T-shaped limestone pillars in the same tradition as Göbekli Tepe — the sister site to Göbekli Tepe across the Tek Tek Mountains, approximately 35 kilometres to the southeast. The enclosures follow the same spatial logic: a ring of smaller peripheral pillars surrounding larger central elements, the whole forming a circular sacred space whose organisation and pillar form connect directly to the Göbekli Tepe tradition. Karahan Tepe is distinguished from Göbekli Tepe by its greater variety of enclosure forms — circular, oval, and rectangular — and by the presence of a unique partially subterranean chamber whose pillars take a different form from the standard T-shape. The stone circle tradition at Karahan Tepe, contemporary with or slightly earlier than Göbekli Tepe at c. 9400 BCE, confirms that the circular stone enclosure programme was not a unique invention at a single site but a distributed construction tradition across the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Taş Tepeler — the Stone Hills culture of southeastern Anatolia.

Subterranean Complexes

Karahan Tepe's most distinctive and most recently revealed feature is the Taş Tepeler building type B — a partially subterranean elliptical chamber approximately 7 metres in diameter, entered through a carved passage, with its floor approximately 2 metres below the surrounding ground level. The chamber walls incorporate a series of limestone pillars emerging directly from the bedrock floor — not freestanding T-pillars but anthropomorphic pillar-heads carved in three dimensions, their lower bodies still embedded in the bedrock from which they were partially carved. The chamber is genuinely subterranean — its floor is below the surrounding ground level, its walls are the carved bedrock, and the pillar-heads emerging from the floor are part of the bedrock geology shaped into human-like forms. This is the most unusual subterranean construction in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic record — an underground chamber where the bedrock floor itself has been given human faces and bodies, partially liberated from the stone, as if the earth itself is inhabited by beings emerging from below.

T-Shaped Pillars

Karahan Tepe's T-shaped pillars closely mirror those of Göbekli Tepe and may predate them, with recent excavations revealing a dense concentration of T-pillars in a semi-subterranean enclosure. Several display anthropomorphic carved details — heads, ribs, a phallus — making the representational intent of the T-form more explicit here than at Göbekli Tepe. The cross-cultural recurrence of this precise architectural form, from the hills of Şanlıurfa to the limestone plateau of Menorca, across millennia of apparent separation, remains without a satisfying explanation in conventional prehistory.