What is happening
On 16 July 2026, a team began the first archaeological excavation ever carried out at Yoğunburç, a Neolithic mound in the Karaköprü district of Şanlıurfa. It is one of the twelve sites in the Taş Tepeler project, and until now it had never been dug.
The team is led by Prof. Dr. Gan Caichao of China's State Cultural Heritage Administration Archaeological Research Center, working with the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum. Of the 22 people on site, seven are Chinese archaeologists.
Both the Taş Tepeler coordinator, Prof. Necmi Karul, and the Chinese team have described it the same way: this is the People's Republic of China's first excavation project in Türkiye.
What has come out of the ground
This is an opening season — the aim is to trace the site's edges and find where material concentrates, not to expose monuments. Even so, the first trenches have already produced beads, flint tools, and wild boar teeth.
Small finds like these carry more than they seem to. Worked flint and shaped beads at a 12,000-year-old site speak to skill and to ornament — people making tools and making decoration, not merely surviving. Prof. Gan has said the beads and tools show the people here were 'very intelligent and clever'.
The mound covers roughly 22 hectares. Only a first sounding has been opened; what kind of place Yoğunburç was — domestic, communal, or both — is exactly what the coming seasons are meant to establish.
Why it matters
Two things. First, a genuinely unexcavated Taş Tepeler site is being opened with modern method from the very first trench — a rare chance to watch a Neolithic site read from a blank page rather than reinterpreted from an old dig.
Second, the shape of the project is changing. A Japanese team began at Ayanlar Höyük in 2025; a Chinese team is now at Yoğunburç. Taş Tepeler is becoming a place the world's archaeologists come to work, not only to visit.
What is uncertain
Almost everything past the first finds. With a single opening season there is no site plan, no dating from Yoğunburç itself, and no architecture yet — only the mound's size and its first small finds. Treat this as the start of a dig, not a result.
We will update this page as the first season is reported.