The power of the head: Sefer Tepe's double-headed slab
A carved slab with a human head at each end deepens Sefer Tepe's preoccupation with the head — and ties it to Karahan Tepe, Çayönü and the two-headed plaster statue of Ain Ghazal. Our illustrated feature on what the double-head motif may have meant.
Read the feature →Twelve more skulls from the skull room
A fresh season adds twelve human skulls from the 10th millennium BCE — bringing the public total to 31, with 2025 reporting further remains in and near the chamber. The dead of Sefertepe, of all ages, continue to emerge from a single prepared room.
Read the report →Eight in the chamber, four in a neighbouring cell
The season's twelve skulls did not come from one spot: eight were lifted from the skull room itself and four more from an adjoining cell — a hint that the practice of keeping the dead close was not confined to a single chamber. Most skulls were found without their mandibles and without other bones, a pattern the team reads as deliberate selection rather than ordinary burial.
Read the report →Human faces emerge from the stone
A specially arranged platform reveals two carved human faces — one in high relief, one in low — in a style unlike any other Taş Tepeler site, alongside a double-faced bead. Sefertepe gains a face-imagery anchor to set beside its skulls.
Read the report →A pebble-sized bead carved with two faces
Among the smallest finds is one of the most striking: a basalt bead only a few centimetres across, carved with a miniature human face on each side. Reported at roughly 8,500 years old, its precision is remarkable for the early Neolithic — proof that Sefertepe's symbolic world was worked not only at the scale of the room but at the scale of the hand, in objects carried between people.
Read the report →The lone skull that faced east
Notes taken on site with the excavation team recorded 22 skulls at that moment — 21 grouped in the skull room with infant remains, and one skull standing apart, reportedly facing east. We publish this as field-note information awaiting formal confirmation, because the detail matters.
Read the full skull-room story →Türkiye unveils new finds at Göbekli Tepe and Sefertepe
A national presentation of the season's results placed Sefertepe alongside Göbekli Tepe among the year's headline discoveries — the skull room and the carved faces named as evidence that the eastern Taş Tepeler carried its own distinct ritual world, some 12,000 years deep.
Read the report →Five years of Taş Tepeler
Türkiye marks half a decade of the Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project — the programme rewriting human history across the Stone Hills, with Sefertepe among the twelve sites at its heart.
Read the report →Why we keep the counts separate
You will see several skull numbers for Sefertepe — 22, 31, more. They are snapshots, not contradictions: field counts, published totals, and each new season all differ. Rather than quietly pick one, we date and separate them. That transparency is how a source earns trust while a site is still coming out of the ground.
How we handle the evidence →