The discovery
Excavations led by Necmi Karul of Istanbul University have uncovered more than thirty dwellings on the slope of Karahan Tepe — compact, partly sunk into the ground, with hearths and grinding stones, and in some cases standing stones set inside the homes themselves.
The houses cluster densely together, pointing to a closely knit community. When they were eventually abandoned, their interiors were filled with soil and their small pillars deliberately toppled — an echo, at domestic scale, of the way the great enclosures were buried.
Why it matters
For years the Taş Tepeler sites were imagined mainly as ritual sanctuaries — places people gathered but didn't live. The village beneath Karahan changes that picture. The people who raised the carved pillars were also householders, cooks and early farmers, and the sacred and the everyday sat side by side.
That standing stones appear inside ordinary homes is the quiet headline: the symbolic world of the pillars reached right into domestic life, not just the special buildings on the hill.