Not Just a Skull Cult: What Göbeklitepe's First Intact Burials Reveal About Its Scattered Dead

Göbeklitepe brings to mind mystery, awe, and inspiration. I have faint memories of being glued to TV documentaries about the ancient site, and every so often I get the urge to check what has happened there since I last looked. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw a new study analysing the first two intact burials at the site. I read it immediately, then spent the rest of the evening watching documentaries.

When Göbeklitepe was first surveyed in the 1960s, it was dismissed as medieval. Excavations revealed massive carved T-shaped pillars, symbolic art, and monumental architecture. This upended the accepted story of the Neolithic Revolution: that people settled down and invented agriculture, and only once they had surplus food and stable, hierarchical communities could they build monuments, organise religion, and create complex art.

Göbeklitepe shows we should give our hunter-gatherer ancestors more credit, because they achieved all this before farming or domesticating animals. The site has offered many answers, but also new mysteries, among them its human remains. Now, analysis of two intact burials from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (8,700–8,000 BCE) layers may explain the seemingly random spread of human remains across the site.

Did people scatter them as part of a ritual, was it all part of the infamous "skull cult", or could something else explain what happened to the dead of Göbeklitepe all those millennia ago?

Finding Göbeklitepe

Göbeklitepe lies 15 km northeast of the city of Şanlıurfa in southeastern Türkiye. The first field survey in 1963 catalogued the mound as a medieval cemetery and moved on. In 1994, Klaus Schmidt visited the site and noted the large limestone slabs sticking out of the ground (some of which would turn out to be over 5.5 metres tall and weigh almost 10 tonnes!).

He began excavating the following year, and it quickly became clear that the site was anything but medieval; instead, it dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (9,600–8,700 BCE) and the Early/Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (8,700–8,000 BCE).

Fun fact: my former professors were once invited to visit the site by Schmidt. Of course they happily agreed, but were only told upon landing in Türkiye that there was a tiny problem. The military were performing some sort of exercises (I have no idea what the correct terminology is). Still, it meant the area, including the site, had to be cleared by 7 AM and they were only allowed to return after 5 PM. In between, they had to cover the massive columns with steel plates to protect them from potential shrapnel. What a fun experience!

Okay, back to the discovery.

At first, it was believed that Göbeklitepe was a ritual centre, a sort of temple that hunter-gatherers would routinely visit. But growing evidence shows it was also a place where people lived permanently. Excavations have revealed housing, small storage spaces and the remains of everyday activities like grinding stones.

Göbeklitepe was not alone; other Neolithic sites are scattered across the landscape, including Sayburç, Karahantepe, Harbetsuvan Tepesi, and Gürcütepe. Together, they reveal a complex, interconnected Neolithic society, built, organised, and maintained by hunter-gatherers.

The Mystery of Göbeklitepe's Human Remains

Since its discovery, researchers have also been unearthing human remains: fragments from men, women and children. But which bones belong to whom isn't possible to tell (at least not without genetic testing). So far, 928 fragments have been unearthed. Exactly how the bones ended up at Göbeklitepe, especially those inside the special buildings, has been debated.

The earliest theories thought they were placed there intentionally as part of a ritual. As skull fragments were particularly common, the idea of a "skull cult" became popular. The idea made sense at the time, when Göbeklitepe was seen mainly as a ritual centre, with rich iconography including headless human figures (most famously on Pillar 43), severed stone heads, and imagery from nearby sites of animals and birds grasping human heads.

Nearby sites like Sefertepe have recently revealed their own skulls, including at least 21 skulls carefully arranged in a small room dubbed the "skull chamber". At Göbeklitepe, however, the skull fragments are, well, fragments, and they, alongside all the other bones, are flung all about the site seemingly without rhyme or reason.

This led to the second hypothesis: maybe earthquakes, landslides, or heavy rains washed these bones out of their original graves. But how do you test that?

Two Burials at Göbeklitepe

The narrative began to change when archaeologists discovered a collective burial in trench DR1 in 2017 while constructing a drainage channel. It was dug into the plaster floor of a Pre-Pottery Neolithic building. Inside were three fairly complete but completely jumbled individuals: a female at least 35, a male between 20 and 30 years old, and another female aged 11 to 14. A potential fourth person may also have been laid here. Most of these bones were no longer in situ, with the skulls placed in one corner while the other bones were piled in the centre or arranged along the wall.

The second intact burial was discovered in trench L09-65 in 2012, but time constraints meant it was sealed and not fully excavated until 10 years later, in 2022. The individual within was a 20- to 30-year-old female, though some cranial remains discovered in 2012 may have belonged to a male. She lay on her side, her legs tucked up as if sleeping.

Yet these two burials open the door to an intriguing possibility: what if the other human remains at Göbeklitepe were not scattered around as part of a ritual, but were once domestic burials displaced over time? To find out, the researchers took a closer look at the bones.

Looking a Little Closer

Figuring out what happened to remains after death is called taphonomy, and each bit of damage tells you something about what that bone went through. The researchers wanted to know whether these bones show the same damage as those found throughout the site.

The collective burial was too small to have held three, maybe even four individuals at once, and the presence of small hand and foot bones like carpals and tarsals suggests whole bodies had been buried. They had no cut marks, so they hadn't been defleshed, while the piles suggest they may have been moved aside, possibly to make space for future burials. The bones were very fragmented, with many encrusted with calcareous deposits (a mineral crust that can seep into the fragments and split them apart), and others showed signs of rodent gnawing.

What was missing were anthropogenic marks, aka signs that humans had manipulated them, like cut marks, ochre staining or burning.

The burial of the young woman told a similar story; she was laid to rest once and left largely undisturbed. And yet her bones were also fragmented, likely crushed by the heavy soil she lay under for thousands of years. As in the collective burial, her bones had calcareous deposits and possible rodent gnaw marks, suggesting small critters managed to crawl into her grave and move some of the bones around.

The damage suggests much of what we see on the other scattered human remains happened while they still lay in their primary burials. And how did they end up scattered around the site? The special buildings sit in a hollow, surrounded on three sides by the built-up mound, with houses on the higher ground above.

Over time, building activity higher up increased pressure on the slopes; then heavy rains and earthquakes, both of which still occur today, may have caused landslides and soil erosion, washing the burials down the hill and across the site. This could explain a lot: why men, women, and children are mixed together, why the remains occur across the site instead of in specific locations and why they are all so heavily fragmented.

So the mystery is solved, right? Not exactly. Soil erosion alone does not explain those human remains that did exhibit cut marks. While corvids are known to scavenge, they are four times more common at Göbeklitepe than at other sites of the same period, suggesting at least some of the remains were deliberately left in the open, and bones found in the wall niches at Sayburç may hint that some of Göbeklitepe's burials were also not interred in the ground.

Does that mean all human remains at Göbeklitepe have a similar 'mundane' explanation? Well, first of all, mundane is a bit harsh. Second, no; some may have had ritual significance. To be fair, the act of burial is in itself a ritual experience. It tells you about a person's culture and beliefs.

What Göbeklitepe can still tell us and what we thought it had been telling us is ever-changing. Whether a skull cult existed here or not, the in situ burials remind us that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were more than simple, wandering peoples; they could build monuments, organise into complex societies and, when the time came, mourn their dead just as deeply as we do.

Only about 5-10% of the site has been excavated, although excavations are ongoing; not much more than that will probably be excavated in the foreseeable future. Why? Simple: future archaeologists will have better technologies and techniques that will reveal more about Göbeklitepe than we can now. In the past, bones deemed uninteresting were simply thrown away; we don't do that anymore, but excavation is inherently destructive, and we may be destroying something a future team of researchers needs to answer a question. Given how important Göbeklitepe is to our understanding of our Neolithic ancestors, preserving as much of it as we can is best practice.

What do you think happened to the dead at Göbeklitepe, and what else do you think or hope is still waiting to be discovered there?

Let me know what you think, and if you'd like to support this blog and the person writing it, you can chip in once, monthly, or yearly. Only if you'd like to.

References:

Fazli Karabacak. (2026, April 16). Göbekli Tepe. Göbekli Tepe. https://gobekli-tepe.com/

Gresky, J., & Clare, L. (2026). First burials give insights into mortuary rites at Göbeklitepe, Early Neolithic Türkiye. PloS one, 21(9), e0358979. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0358979

GÖBEKLİTEPE ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITE. (2018). T.C. Kültür Ve Turizm Bakanlığı. https://muze.gov.tr/muze-detay?SectionId=SGT01&DistId=SGT