Among the bones at Göbekli Tepe are fragments of at least three human skulls that were stripped of flesh and then carved — deep, straight grooves cut into the bone after death. Nothing quite like them had been found before.
The three skulls carry deliberate incisions made with stone tools on already-dry bone: long grooves running front-to-back over the crown, and on one skull a drilled hole. Cut-marks show the heads were first defleshed. The bone is human, adult, and the work is careful, not casual damage.
We read the groove and the drilled hole as fixings — a way to hang, tether, or steady a skull so it could be carried, mounted, or displayed. Whether these were honoured ancestors or the heads of enemies, the act says the same thing: here the dead were not buried and forgotten. They were kept, worked, and shown.
This is our reading of published evidence, and the exact meaning stays open.
Why it matters
Across the early Neolithic Near East, people treated the human head as something special — skulls were removed, kept, and at sites like Jericho even plastered into faces. Göbekli Tepe gives the carved version of that impulse, and gives it early. It turns the site from a place of pillars into a place that was also handling its dead in a deliberate, ritual way.
- Fragments of at least three adult human skulls.
- Deep grooves cut front-to-back across the top of the skull.
- One skull also drilled with a single hole.
- Cut-marks show the heads were defleshed first.
- Read as the earliest known evidence of a Neolithic 'skull cult'.
A world without graves
The carved skulls make more sense against what is missing. Göbekli Tepe has produced no cemetery and no laid-out graves — nobody was buried intact in or around the great enclosures. What turns up instead is human bone, broken and scattered through the rubble that fills the buildings.
So the treatment of the dead here was not interment. It was something done to parts of the body, and above all to the head. The three modified skulls are the sharpest expression of a wider pattern: a community that kept, handled and marked the skulls of its dead rather than putting whole bodies in the ground. It is the earliest documented case of that behaviour anywhere, and it is why Göbekli Tepe sits at the centre of the debate over the Neolithic ‘skull cult’.
Sources & further reading5 references
- Schmidt, K. (2012). Göbekli Tepe: A Stone Age Sanctuary in South-Eastern Anatolia. Berlin: ex oriente. The foundational monograph by the site's first excavator.
- Clare, L. (2020). Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. A brief summary of research at a new World Heritage Site (2015–2019). e-Forschungsberichte des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 2020(2): 81–88.
- Notroff, J., Dietrich, O. & Schmidt, K. (2014). Building Monuments, Creating Communities. Early monumental architecture at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Göbekli Tepe. In J.F. Osborne (ed.), Approaching Monumentality in Archaeology: 83–105. Albany: SUNY Press.
- The Tepe Telegrams (official research blog of the Göbekli Tepe Project, DAI). The Tepe Telegrams. Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. link Accessible, authoritative running commentary from the excavation team.
- Gresky, J., Haelm, J. & Clare, L. (2017). Modified human crania from Göbekli Tepe provide evidence for a new form of Neolithic skull cult. Science Advances 3(6): e1700564. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1700564
Full bibliography: the Taş Tepeler reference library →