A new area, on a side never dug before
For most of Göbekli Tepe's modern excavation, work has concentrated on the southern and western parts of the mound. In the 2026 season, for the first time, a team opened ground on the northern side — an area roughly 80 by 70 metres.
Before a trowel went in, surface survey and geomagnetic measurements mapped what lies buried there. The readings point to a mix of large public buildings alongside rectangular structures and huts — the same pairing of the monumental and the everyday that is reshaping how the whole site is read. Work continues in parallel in the established GT1 and GT2 zones, where rectangular buildings of the 8th millennium BCE (the site's later phase) are being exposed.
Steel cables on the oldest monuments
Alongside the digging, 2026 is a conservation year. In Enclosure C, the reinforcement begun in 2025 continues, and fragments from the surface of a re-raised pillar are being set back in their original places.
In Enclosure D — the most famous of the enclosures — the walls have been stabilised, and the ground connections of the two central pillars reinforced with steel cables to make them safer in an earthquake. This is a seismically active region, and the central pillars are among the most important carved monuments anywhere in the Neolithic world. Cabling them is unglamorous, and exactly the right thing to do.
Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy framed the season as excavation and preservation advancing together — 'a holistic approach' — as research expands to new ground.
Why it matters
Opening the north side is not a tidy add-on. If large public buildings really do sit there, the monumental heart of Göbekli Tepe is bigger and more spread out than the excavated core suggests — and the presence of huts among them keeps pressing the question of whether people also lived on the hill.
It is the clearest sign yet that, after decades of work, Göbekli Tepe is still only partly uncovered.
What is uncertain
The north-area picture so far is geophysics, not excavation — survey readings indicating buried structures, which digging will confirm, revise, or complicate. No finds from the new area have been published.
We will update this page as the 2026 season, which runs to October, reports its results.