Taş Tepeler — the Stone Hills
Göbekli Tepe was never alone. It is the most famous of more than a dozen Neolithic sites across the Şanlıurfa region — a whole lost world only now coming into view.
For years Göbekli Tepe seemed like a singular wonder — an isolated marvel on its hilltop. We now know it was the flagship of a far larger phenomenon. Taş Tepeler, meaning the "Stone Hills," is the name given to a network of related Neolithic sites scattered across the landscape around Şanlıurfa.
Not one site, but many
Across this region lie a dozen or more Neolithic sites that share a common world of architecture and imagery: T-shaped pillars, monumental enclosures, animal reliefs and human figures, all created in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. They are not scattered curiosities but pieces of a single cultural landscape — communities that, over many generations, built, carved and gathered in strikingly similar ways.
Recognising this changed everything. Göbekli Tepe is no longer read as a lone temple but as the grandest expression of a widespread tradition. Each newly studied hill helps explain the others.
Some of the sites
Among the better-known members of the network are:
- Göbekli Tepe — the flagship, with its great enclosures and towering central pillars.
- Karahan Tepe — about 46 km east, famous for pillars cut from bedrock and a dramatic subterranean room.
- Sayburç — noted for a remarkable narrative relief scene carved on a building wall, showing humans alongside animals.
- Sefer Tepe — another T-pillar site contributing to the picture of the wider tradition.
- Nevalı Çori — an early-excavated site whose monumental building and human-figure finds foreshadowed much of what Göbekli Tepe later revealed.
These sit alongside others still being surveyed and studied. The full extent of the network is not yet known.
A coordinated investigation
"Taş Tepeler" is also the name of the broad research effort that ties this work together — a coordinated programme investigating the region's Neolithic sites as a connected whole rather than in isolation. By comparing architecture, imagery and dates across many hills at once, researchers can ask bigger questions: how these communities related to one another, how their ideas spread, and how this densely creative society fits into the story of the Neolithic Revolution.
A lost world being uncovered
What makes Taş Tepeler so compelling is its scale and its freshness. This is not a single famous ruin but an entire chapter of human prehistory emerging in real time, hill by hill, season by season. Göbekli Tepe remains the gateway to it — the place that first made the world look closely at the Stone Hills of Şanlıurfa, and realise how much was waiting there.
An evolving picture. With many Taş Tepeler sites only partly explored, the relationships and exact chronology between them remain open questions. Expect the story to be refined as research across the network continues.