Sefertepe was built by communities of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic — people in the long transition from a hunter-gatherer life toward settled village existence, roughly 10,500 years ago. They belonged to the same cultural world of Upper Mesopotamia that raised Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe: not a lost civilization, but the ancestors of settled life, working out for the first time what it meant to live together in one place and to keep the dead among the living.
Who were the people of Sefertepe?
They were among the earliest people anywhere to commit to a single place. The Taş Tepeler sites capture a hinge moment in the human story — the centuries when mobile bands of hunter-gatherers began to build permanent architecture, gather in numbers, and invest enormous effort in shared ritual before agriculture was fully established. That reordering of everything we once assumed — that farming came first, then villages, then religion — is exactly what makes this landscape so important. At Sefertepe, that revolution shows in a particular register: not monumental pillars, but the management of the human dead inside built rooms.
They were not building a temple to look at. They were building a way to keep the dead present — and that is a kind of architecture too.
Hunter-gatherers or the first farmers?
The honest answer is: both, and neither cleanly. The people of the Taş Tepeler lived in the era when hunting and gathering still provided much of the food, yet permanent settlement — and, over time, the domestication of plants and animals — had begun. Sefertepe's working date of around 10,500 years ago places it somewhat later in that sequence than the earliest layers of Göbekli Tepe, which means its builders were likely closer to the emerging farming world than to the purely mobile hunters who raised the first great pillars a millennium or so earlier.
What did they believe?
We cannot read their minds, but their choices speak. At Sefertepe, human skulls were gathered and kept within a prepared room, infant remains were placed among them, and at least one skull was reported set apart, facing east. Faces were carved in stone in a style found nowhere else; a bead was worked with a face on each side. Taken together, these suggest a community for whom the head — the seat of the face, of identity — remained powerful after death, something to be kept, arranged, and carried rather than simply buried and forgotten. How this fits the wider Neolithic skull cult →
Who excavates Sefertepe today?
The modern work at Sefertepe began in 2021 as part of the Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project, the umbrella programme coordinating the Taş Tepeler digs. Excavation is led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emre Güldoğan of Istanbul University's Department of Prehistoric Archaeology, working under the supervision of the Şanlıurfa Museum. Their season-by-season work is what turns these questions from speculation into evidence — and what this site reports as it emerges. Follow the discoveries →
Frequently asked questions
Who built Sefertepe?
Communities of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic — early villagers of Upper Mesopotamia, part of the same world as Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe. Not a lost or outside civilization.
Were they hunter-gatherers or farmers?
They lived at the hinge between the two. Sefertepe's later date, around 10,500 years ago, places its builders closer to the emergence of farming than the earliest Göbekli Tepe builders.
Who is excavating it now?
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emre Güldoğan (Istanbul University) with the Şanlıurfa Museum, under the Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project, since 2021.
Sources
- Şanlıurfa Neolithic Research Project / Taş Tepeler — Sefertepe site profile.
- Excavation led by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emre Güldoğan, Istanbul University, with Şanlıurfa Museum (2021– ).
- Background on Pre-Pottery Neolithic hunter-gatherers and the Taş Tepeler — Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe research summaries.
- The Community Garden — Taş Tepeler study material and Sefertepe field notes (field-note level; some details await publication).