When we wrote about Göbekli Tepe earlier this year, one of the open problems we listed was the apparent absence of comparable sites from the same period. If mobile hunter-gatherers could build monumental stone enclosures around 9600 BCE, why was there only one?

The answer, it now turns out, is that there was never only one. The 2026 excavation season in southeastern Türkiye has made that clearer than ever, and it has also raised some new questions of its own.

The Stone Hills

Göbekli Tepe is now understood as one site among many in a region archaeologists call Taş Tepeler, Turkish for “Stone Hills.” Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism coordinates excavations at about a dozen Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites around the city of Şanlıurfa, under the direction of Prof. Necmi Karul of Istanbul University. The sites share a recognizable set of features: T-shaped stone pillars, carved animal and human imagery, and buildings set into or carved from the bedrock.

The best known of these neighbors is Karahan Tepe, about 30 kilometers from Göbekli Tepe, where systematic excavation began in 2019. Karahan Tepe has produced some of the most striking art of the period, including a 2.3 meter human statue found in 2023, its ribs carved in relief, seated on a bench inside one of the site’s buildings. In the same year, a painted boar sculpture at Göbekli Tepe provided the first clear evidence that these communities colored their stone figures.

A Rider on a Leopard

In late August 2026, the Ministry announced a find from Karahan Tepe unlike anything previously recovered from the region: a 70 centimeter stone sculpture of a human figure seated on the back of a leopard. According to the Ministry, it was found on a bench running along the wall of a circular structure about three meters across, with a floor paved in flat stones. It is dated to roughly 11,000 years ago.

Leopards appear often in Taş Tepeler art, as do vultures, snakes, and foxes. What is new here is the relationship. A person riding a predator implies a story, a status, or a belief about the boundary between people and dangerous animals. Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy said the find “opens the door to new questions about the earliest periods of human history.” That is diplomatic language, but it is accurate. Nobody yet knows what the figure meant to the people who carved it.

The Sealed Chamber

The same season set out to answer another question. In one corner of a rectangular building at Karahan Tepe, which Karul’s team describes as a structure built for a special purpose rather than a home, there is a small chamber covered by large flat stone slabs. It appears to have been closed off in antiquity.

The plan for 2026 was to lift the slabs one at a time and enter the chamber from above, with work continuing through October. As of this writing, no results have been published. When they are, we will report them here, whatever they turn out to be. An empty chamber would be informative too.

Did People Live at Göbekli Tepe?

For years, the standard description of Göbekli Tepe was a ritual center, a place people visited but did not live. That view has been eroding since 2019, when excavators reported evidence of domestic buildings, water collection, and large-scale food processing at the site.

In August 2026, Karul announced that work in a newly opened sector of about 1,500 square meters, north of the famous enclosures, had exposed rectangular buildings from the site’s later phase, in the 9th millennium BCE. His first impression, as reported by Anadolu Agency, was that they look like dwellings. He was careful to add that walls alone do not settle the question. Soil samples from the floors, which can preserve ash, food waste, and other traces of daily life, are still being analyzed.

If the buildings do prove to be houses, Göbekli Tepe will look less like a temple in the wilderness and more like a settlement with monumental public buildings at its center. That is a significant shift in its own right.

Faces in the Stone

The human figure is becoming more prominent across the region. In late 2025, excavators at Sefer Tepe, led by Assoc. Prof. Emre Güldoğan of Istanbul University, reported two human faces carved on limestone blocks forming a platform that likely served a ceremonial purpose. One is in high relief, with carefully rendered eyes, brows, nose, mouth, and ears. The other is in low relief with closed eyes. Both face north. Güldoğan noted that the stylistic differences between the two are clear, which suggests Sefer Tepe had an artistic tradition of its own rather than simply copying Göbekli Tepe.

What This Changes, and What It Doesn’t

Taş Tepeler resolves one part of the Göbekli Tepe puzzle and sharpens another.

What it resolves: Göbekli Tepe was not a one-off. The monuments were built by a whole landscape of communities that shared symbols, building techniques, and almost certainly beliefs. That makes the site less mysterious as an isolated miracle, and it is a point the mainstream has been making for some time.

What it sharpens: A dozen or more monumental sites, with sophisticated sculpture and a shared visual language, all emerging within a few centuries of the end of the Younger Dryas, is a bigger phenomenon to explain, not a smaller one. Where did this shared tradition come from? How did it develop so fully, apparently without a long visible apprenticeship in the archaeological record? Mainstream researchers point to a gradual buildup among the Natufian and related cultures of the Levant. Heterodox researchers ask whether part of the story lies earlier, in sites lost to the end of the Ice Age. Neither side yet has the evidence to close the question.

The most defensible conclusion is the same one we reached about Göbekli Tepe itself, now on a regional scale: the Stone Hills are telling us that the beginnings of monumental culture were larger, earlier, and more connected than anyone expected, and we are still early in learning how to read them.

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