Who publishes this, and how.

Who runs this

Taş Tepeler is published by The Community Garden, which also runs karahantepe.net and tastepeler.net and organises small-group tours to the region. The tours are led by licensed local guides — professional, Türkiye-accredited archaeological guides who work on the ground in Şanlıurfa.

The site is written and edited by Dakota. Dakota is not Turkish and does not guide the tours; the editing and the guiding are separate jobs done by different people. We are not a university, not a museum, and not connected to the Taş Tepeler project, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, or the German Archaeological Institute. Where we describe their work we are summarising published material, and we say whose it is.

We do run tours to southeastern Türkiye, and we would rather you knew that up front than found out later. It is also why every page carries its sources: so you can check what we say against the published record, not take our word for it.

Why it exists

There is a gap between what has been excavated in Şanlıurfa since 1995 and what is readable about it in English.

The research is published — in Antiquity, in Neo-Lithics, in German Archaeological Institute reports, in Turkish excavation volumes. The popular coverage is mostly one hill, one archaeologist, and a handful of superlatives repeated until they stop meaning anything. Meanwhile eleven other sites are being dug, several of which are more informative than Göbekli Tepe about how these people actually lived.

This site tries to be the thing in between: every site, every structure, every object we can source, written so a non-specialist can follow it and referenced so a specialist can check it.

How we handle evidence

We separate description from interpretation. What was found and where is one kind of statement. What it meant is another, and usually contested. We try never to let the second borrow the confidence of the first.

We say when a claim rests on a press release. Much Taş Tepeler news reaches English through ministry briefings and news agencies months or years before peer-reviewed publication. That material is worth reporting; it is not the same as a published excavation report, and we mark the difference on the page.

We publish disagreements rather than resolving them for you. Where sources conflict — on a bead's material, on a skull count, on whether an enclosure was roofed — we show the conflict.

Active excavation means some of this will be wrong. That is not a disclaimer, it is how the field works. Sites get re-dated. Interpretations collapse. We would rather update a page than defend it.

How this is written

Research, drafting and site-building here are AI-assisted, using Claude, with a human editor responsible for what publishes.

We are stating that plainly because you would be entitled to be annoyed at discovering it later. What it means in practice: no claim goes up without a locatable source; citations are checked against the actual publication rather than accepted from a summary; and where a source could not be verified, the claim is cut rather than softened.

It has caught us out. A citation was drafted once that attributed a 1995 Anatolica paper to the wrong journal and year. It was checked before publication and corrected. That is the process working, and it is the reason the process exists.

What we do not have

Our own field photography. Almost every photograph here is either Creative Commons from Wikimedia Commons, used with permission from the German Archaeological Institute, or the site owner's own footage. We credit each one where it appears. We are working on this; it is the largest gap on the site.

Complete coverage. Some sites — Yoğunburç, Mendik, Söğüt Tarlası — have almost nothing published about them. Their pages are short because the evidence is thin, and we would rather say so than pad them.

Academic review. No archaeologist currently reviews these pages. If you work on these sites and would be willing to, we would like to hear from you.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.

Write to info@thecommunitygarden.org — this address is for corrections, questions and press, not only tour enquiries. Corrections about a specific page are most useful with the URL and, where possible, the source that contradicts us.