12 more skulls uncovered
A fresh season adds twelve human skulls from the 10th millennium BCE — bringing the total to 31 and deepening the evidence for ritual around the dead.
Read more →A Neolithic settlement in the Stone Hills
A village built around its dead
On the eastern edge of the Taş Tepeler, near Viranşehir, a farming-and-hunting community raised rectangular stone houses more than ten thousand years ago — and, unlike almost anywhere else, kept the skulls of their dead inside the settlement. Excavated since 2021 as part of the Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project, Sefertepe is quietly becoming one of the most important places for understanding how the first settled people thought about death.
The dead were not sent away. They were kept — in niches, in walls, in the rooms where the living gathered.