First Burials Found at Göbeklitepe Solve Old Mystery

For more than 30 years, archaeologists digging at Göbeklitepe kept finding the same puzzling thing: broken human bones scattered among the site’s massive stone structures, with no graves nearby to explain where they came from. Two newly studied burials may finally offer an answer.

A 30-Year Puzzle of Scattered Bones

Since excavations began in 1995, the German Archaeological Institute’s long-running Turkish-German project at Göbeklitepe, in southeastern Türkiye, has recovered 928 individual human bone fragments from the fill of its monumental buildings and the spaces between them. The fragments represent men and women across different age groups, but their scattered distribution made it nearly impossible to connect individual pieces to specific people or to identify where they had originally been buried.

The First Burial: A Family Grave Reused Over Time

Researchers Julia Gresky and Lee Clare describe the first burial in a new study published in PLOS ONE. Construction workers preparing a drainage channel came across it in 2017, beneath the plaster floor of a rectangular building. The kidney-shaped pit held the remains of at least three people, a woman at least 35 years old, a man between 20 and 30, and an adolescent girl around 11 to 14, with skulls gathered in one corner and other bones arranged elsewhere in the pit. An extra skull fragment and two mismatched foot bones hint at a possible fourth individual. Researchers believe the small size of the pit means the community buried these people at different times, moving earlier remains aside to make room, rather than placing everyone in the grave at once.

A Second Grave Beside a Monumental Building

Archaeologists found the second burial even earlier, in 2012, but reburied it for protection before they had time to fully excavate it. They returned in 2022 to finish the work. This grave sat just west of Göbeklitepe’s Monumental Building A and held the largely undisturbed remains of a young woman, likely between 20 and 30 years old, lying on her left side with her legs bent and her face turned east, resting on a bed of fist-sized stones. Researchers caution that a few skull fragments found nearby may belong to someone else entirely.

Erosion, Not Ritual, May Explain the Bones

Both burials, dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period around 8700 to 8000 BC, showed extensive fragmentation from soil pressure, calcareous mineral deposits, and animal activity, even though the second grave had remained largely undisturbed in place. That finding matters because it shows severe fragmentation can happen naturally, without anyone deliberately breaking up a body. Gresky and Clare propose that some of the site’s 928 loose bone fragments may originally have come from similar burials located higher up the settlement mound, with slope erosion gradually carrying soil, building debris, and human remains downhill into the lower monumental structures over time. That would mean at least some of the puzzling bones represent ordinary burials disturbed by geology, not a distinct mortuary ritual, adding to a growing view of Göbeklitepe as a place with real domestic life alongside its monumental architecture.

A Separate Mystery That Remains Unsolved

The researchers are careful not to claim erosion explains everything. Alongside the scattered fragments, archaeologists have separately identified skull pieces from five individuals bearing deep, deliberate cut marks, evidence of a distinct practice that this study doesn’t address. Similar variation shows up at other sites in the Taş Tepeler region: Sefertepe has yielded a chamber holding at least 21 human skulls, mostly facing southeast, while Karahantepe has produced skull fragments with signs of cutting, scraping, and fire exposure. Göbeklitepe’s more diffuse pattern of bones stands apart from these concentrated deposits, suggesting several different mortuary customs coexisted in Neolithic Anatolia. Further dating and analysis will be needed to work out when each of these practices took place and how they relate to one another.

Sources

This report draws on the German Archaeological Institute’s own announcement and the peer-reviewed study by Julia Gresky and Lee Clare, published in PLOS ONE.