The Göbekli benchmark
In 2017 the Göbekli Tepe team described something that gave the site a new kind of fame: fragments of human skull bearing deliberate cut marks, deep carved grooves, and in one case a drilled perforation. The excavators read them as skulls that had been defleshed, modified and probably suspended or displayed — a 'skull cult', a way of keeping and showing particular dead.
That finding set a benchmark for the whole region. Wherever human remains turn up at a Taş Tepeler site, the natural question is now: is this the same practice?
What Sayburç's dead show
At Sayburç, the answer is close, but not the same. Dr Eylem Özdoğan, who excavates the site, describes secondary burial: skulls and long bones handled after death, with traces related to defleshing and, in some contexts, burning. The dead here were not simply laid in the ground and left — they were curated, revisited, moved.
Prof. Necmi Karul adds a specific context from the same site: a wall chamber, or cell, holding skulls and long bones, probably from five or six individuals. So Sayburç clearly belongs to the same regional world in which the dead are worked with after death rather than sealed away.
The precise negative
Here is the contrast worth recording. Özdoğan states that Sayburç has no confirmed evidence of perforated or suspended skulls comparable to the Göbekli Tepe examples. The broad regional theme — postmortem handling of skulls and bones — is present. The specific practice that made Göbekli famous — drilling and hanging a skull — is not attested here, at least not yet.
A recorded negative like this is easy to overlook and genuinely valuable. It says the excavator looked for the Göbekli signature and did not find it — which is data, not silence.
Why it matters
It cuts against the temptation to flatten Taş Tepeler into one uniform 'skull cult'. Across these neighbouring sites there is a shared preoccupation with the dead — but expressed in related, not identical, ways. Sayburç curates and defleshes; Göbekli, on current evidence, went a step further and displayed. Same grammar, different sentence.
It also shows how careful excavators build a regional picture: not by assuming every site repeats the headline find, but by noting exactly where the practices overlap and where they diverge.
What is uncertain
'No hung skulls at Sayburç' is a current negative at an actively excavated site — it can change with the next season, and it means not yet attested, not proven never to have happened. The readings of defleshing and burning are provisional interpretations of fragmentary remains.
These positions come from interview and lecture material (Özdoğan on Sayburç's burials; Karul on the skull-and-bone cell) alongside the published record; they may be refined in formal publication. Spoken positions may be refined in print.