Beside its skulls, Sefertepe has produced something rarer still: carved human faces. Reported from a specially arranged platform, a pair of faces — one worked in high relief, one in low — appears in a style unlike anything at Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe or Sayburç. Together with a small double-faced bead, they pose the question that runs through the whole site: what happens to the face after the person is gone?
- Site
- Sefertepe, Şanlıurfa
- Features
- Face platform · dual-faced bead
- Relief
- One high, one low · both facing north
- Reported
- 2025 (5th) season · PPNB, ~8,500 yrs
The paired face platform
The clearest of Sefertepe's face finds, unveiled after the 2025 season and announced by Türkiye's Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, is a platform structure with two human faces carved on a dressed limestone block — one head set at each front corner, and both oriented northward. One is worked in confident high relief with detailed features; the other is shallower and more stylised, almost ghostlike. Excavators read the contrast not just as technique but as a possible sign of two identities or states expressed on a single surface. The style — subtle differences in cheek, brow and nose — sets it apart from Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe and Sayburç, hinting that Sefertepe cultivated its own local sculptural idiom. Dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, roughly 8,500 years ago, the platform gives Sefertepe a clear face-imagery anchor beside its skull room, tying heads, faces and architecture together.
The dual-faced bead
Among the smaller finds is a double-faced anthropomorphic bead — a bead carved with a human face on each side. Sources differ on its material (described in some reports as black basalt, in others as black serpentinite), and its precise find context has not yet been published. What matters is its scale. A bead can be worn, hidden, exchanged, placed with the dead, or kept against the skin. The dual-faced bead shows personhood shrunk to the hand — the face made portable, carried between people and their identities.
Göbekli gives monumental image. Sefertepe may give hand-scale image — the face made small enough to carry.
Small objects, close to the body
Sefertepe keeps the guide from worshipping size. Its archive also preserves a snakehead-bead lane and a boar-on-tool lane — animal presence reduced from the pillar to the ornament and the working object. These should not be inflated too quickly; each needs firm source confirmation before it is made central. But their importance is exactly their scale: they show that symbolic and animal life did not only live on monumental stone. It could sit against skin, travel between people, and enter the tools of daily work. Explore Sefertepe's full symbolic world →
Why faces?
A face can be a mask, a portrait, a sign, an ancestor, a warning, a substitute, or a made presence. Sefertepe does not tell us which — and that is the honest position. When face imagery appears beside a room of skulls, the site joins the wider Neolithic problem of how to hold onto a person once ordinary life has ended. The head is where recognition gathers; the face is where it can be remade. At Sefertepe, both seem to have been kept close, and kept deliberately.
Frequently asked questions
What carved faces were found at Sefertepe?
A specially arranged platform with a pair of human faces — one in high relief, one in low — in a style distinct from the other Taş Tepeler sites, plus a double-faced bead.
What is the dual-faced bead made of?
Reports differ — some describe black basalt, others black serpentinite. The material and exact find context await publication.
How do the faces relate to the skull room?
Both belong to the same site and the same set of questions about the dead and the face, but the exact spatial relationship between the face platform and the skull room has not yet been published.
Sources
- Türkiye Today — "8,500-year-old carved faces, tiny double-faced bead reshape Sefertepe's role in Taş Tepeler," Nov 2025 (high/low relief on a platform block; PPNB; bead materials).
- Wikipedia — Sefer Tepe (two face reliefs on limestone platform blocks, both oriented north, c. 8000 BC).
- Arkeonews — "12,000-Year-Old Human Faces Emerge from Sefertepe," and "An 8,500-Year-Old Micro-Carved Bead," 2025.
- The Community Garden — Sefertepe structure notes (paired face platform; dual-faced bead context).