Hallan Çemi

Hallan Çemi in context

One of the earliest villages

Hallan Çemi, in the hills of eastern Anatolia on a tributary of the Tigris, is among the oldest known sedentary settlements in the region, dating to around 10,000 BCE. Its excavations, led by Michael Rosenberg, exposed round, semi-subterranean houses grouped around an open central area — people building to stay in one place, at the very threshold of settled life.

Crucially, they did so before farming. Hallan Çemi's inhabitants were still hunter-gatherers, living on wild plants and animals, yet already committed to a fixed community.

Feasting before farming

The site is best known for evidence of feasting — concentrations of animal bone and the debris of large-scale food sharing — which suggests that communal gathering and consumption, not agriculture, was among the forces drawing people together. The animal remains, including a rich record of birds, point to a broad-spectrum economy that took in everything the landscape offered.

In this it prefigures the Taş Tepeler sites, where feasting and gathering also appear to precede and underwrite the shift to settled life.

Its place in the story

Hallan Çemi captures a crucial moment on the road to the Neolithic: year-round community without agriculture. It is part of the deep background to Göbekli Tepe — evidence that the impulse to settle, gather and feast was already alive in eastern Anatolia centuries before the first T-pillar was carved, and a reminder that the great enclosures grew out of a world that had already begun to change.