Orientation image for this site profile.
Overview
- Period
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic
- Location
- About 30 km west of Şanlıurfa
- Main Evidence
- New 2025 excavation, Japanese partnership, Large mound landscape
Timeline
- Pre-Pottery Neolithic
- Ayanlar matters because it is a newly opened Taş Tepeler excavation west of Şanlıurfa, with a strong Turkish-Japanese research partnership and Princess Akiko of Mikasa at the 2025 launch. It should be read first as its own place, then compared outward to the wider Taş Tepeler horizon.
Learn
Ayanlar matters because it is a newly opened Taş Tepeler excavation west of Şanlıurfa, with a strong Turkish-Japanese research partnership and Princess Akiko of Mikasa at the 2025 launch. It should be read first as its own place, then compared outward to the wider Taş Tepeler horizon.
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Discoveries
- A newly launched 2025 excavation area west of Şanlıurfa, north of Ayanlar / Hut village and locally known as Gre Hut.
- A large flat mound context: current notes describe a roughly 10 m high mound, while the older Ayanlar Höyük publication reports a broad surface area that still needs careful review before public mapping.
- Older Ayanlar Höyük / Gre Hut material including blades, flakes, points, scrapers, grinding stones, pestles, stone vessel fragments, and a stone weight fragment.
- A decorated stone vessel with animal-motif reporting, useful as a visual material-culture lead but not yet a finished excavated-context claim.
- A possible leopard-head sculpture fragment that belongs in a research-lead lane until source, object number, and provenience are confirmed.
- A Turkish-Japanese research-partnership story involving Chiba Tech, the Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archaeology, and Princess Akiko of Mikasa's 2025 launch attendance.
Structures
- Ayanlar should be read first as a developing excavation, not a finished structure atlas.
- The current public page should lead with landscape, launch history, and material-culture leads: mound, survey/on-site finds, ground stone, stone vessel, lithics, and partnership history.
- Expected monumental architecture remains a project/research lead until excavation plans, dimensions, phases, floors, pillars, and deposits are published.
- The page is strongest when it shows Ayanlar as a live site beginning to reveal itself, while keeping older surface finds separate from 2025+ excavated contexts.
Structure pages
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