12 000 Year Old Stairway Discovered at Karahan Tepe Major Excavations Planned for Göbekli Tepe

Hello everybody and welcome to Ancient Architects. Please subscribe to the channel for regular content on ancient architecture as well as all the latest news from the world of archaeology. A few weeks ago there was a notification on YouTube that Nesmi Carroll, the lead archaeologist on the incredible pre-pottery Neolithic Tashtapela project, was giving a lecture live on YouTube regarding the latest findings on sites like Gobekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, Saberc and so on. Sadly, not long after the conference was streamed it was taken off YouTube, but not before I had time to translate the video the best I could and also take some screenshots, because there was some fantastic information presented by Carroll and this still hasn't filtered into the western world. Whilst excavations at the pre-pottery Neolithic sites continue year after year, very little has been published in the past five years. There really is a severe lack of detailed archaeological papers and a lack of up-to-date information about new findings, the current thinking and so on. To learn anything new, we have to rely on news stories in the media and such stories are usually somewhat sensational and also contain inaccuracies, like still calling Gobekli Tepe the world's oldest temple. They skim over the details and focus on the highlights. A painted boar statue, a pillar with a human face, a human statue inside a wall, but such media stories often lack context and expert opinion. But conferences and presentations are taking place, often in the native Turkish language. And it's this language barrier that makes it tough to find the information or to even conduct a basic Google search. Thankfully, I watched the latest conference and although the translation was not easy, I think I have the key information and some new details worth sharing. For example, there are some new aerial photos of Karahan Tepe and they show the relationship between the new tiered oval building, the new rectangular building and the large building AD. And it really is quite fascinating. Turkish archaeologists have also found the world's oldest stairway. There is talk of paint on the pillars. More details have been offered regarding how the sites and buildings developed over time, how and why buildings were decommissioned, new excavations planned for Göbekli Tepe and more. So in this video, I'll run through exactly what I found out and hopefully shed some new light on the incredible Teştepele site of southeastern Turkey. I'll start at what is arguably my favourite site in the region, the incredible Karahan Tepe, which continues to be excavated year after year on a large scale. So far, I visited twice, in October 2024 and October 2025 and I will again in October this year. To join me on the 2026 tour, click the link in the description below. Because the changes to this site year after year are often quite dramatic. It really is quite special to see the site evolving. So to start, here is the brand new aerial photograph of the excavations at Karahan Tepe. Here I'm pointing out the large communal building AD, the pillared enclosure AB and the building with a pit inside AA. And over here is a newly excavated communal building with tiered benches. This is the one with a large human statue holding his phallus. Looking in plan view, and you can see that its size is comparable to building AD which is located further down the hill. The excavated buildings at Karahan Tepe are classified as either communal or domestic in nature. The ones circled in red are domestic and the ones in blue are communal. Dr Carroll calls the domestic buildings dwellings, meaning that people lived inside and they're right next to the larger buildings with a more public function. Thankfully, times have moved on and he doesn't call the communal buildings temples, because this is how the media commonly refers to them. As he himself admits, it's unknown how these buildings were used 10 to 12,000 years ago and while yes, they could have been used for worship, with the current level of knowledge, nothing about their use can be said with any certainty. It's all hypothesis and theory. Carroll went on to discuss the development of Karahan Tepe over time, a settlement that was lived in for hundreds and hundreds of years and he compares its appearance to a honeycomb, where adjacent buildings shared a wall. The communal public buildings would have played a central role within the settlement, with the residences built around them. As I've mentioned in previous videos, at Karahan Tepe in particular we can see an evolution of the style of architecture. In the earliest part of the settlement's life, buildings were circular or oval in shape. Then buildings evolved into a quadrangular shape with rounded corners and then they changed to fully rectangular with sharp corners. And as I've long thought, Carroll also believed that each structure had a roof and this roof explains the architectural designs of the buildings, whatever their size. And it's really important we understand what we're looking at with regards to pre-pottery neolithic architecture. Pictures like this one from the Netflix show Ancient Apocalypse and many other recreations found online are really misguiding the public. The public buildings at Karahan Tepe in Gobekli Tepe are not standing on the ground. They're built into the ground in a pit. For a new building project, the people of Karahan Tepe would have dug down through the soil and bedrock to a desired depth, set perimeter pillars at regular intervals and line the entire perimeter with smaller stones to keep back the soil and also to firmly fix the pillars in place. Then to give the building a fine finish the walls were plastered. For the bedrock floor, sockets would have been cut for the two central pillars and sometimes the floor was also lined with a lime based terrazzo mixture and this gave the building a fine flat finish. Then the two central pillars would have been brought in, erected in their sockets and a wooden frame would connect them to the pillars on the perimeter. This would be the framework for a roof. Organic material of some kind would have made up the actual roof, whether plant material, mud or leather or maybe a mixture of different materials that were coated with plaster. That was a very basic explanation for how buildings were made because in reality the topography of the land is never perfectly flat. It often slopes and as Dr Carroll says, sometimes the walls are totally in the ground but depending on where you are on the circumference of the building, parts of the walls may be above ground because if the topography is sloping, you still need to have the tops of the walls perfectly horizontal to support a roof. And it does seem the topography did play a big part in the overall design, like how you entered the building. If you did have flat topography and the building was made in the ground, you'd enter via the roof. But if the building was made on the slope of the land, then it seems an entrance was added on the part of the building where the walls are exposed. For example, if we look specifically at Gobekli Tepe building C and where the topography is lower, an entrance corridor is being created. As you enter the corridor you're walking into the earth, so that when you reach the middle of building C, you're very much underground, but you enter above ground. So these ancient people understood geography and geology and designed their architecture to fit within the local landscape. And although many of us think the floors of these structures are always bedrock, as stated by Dr Carroll, sometimes the floors are not bedrock at all, they're soil and the concrete like terrazzo mixture has been poured onto the soil to make a solid flat surface. And that's because buildings were planned to be a certain height. If below the soil the bedrock was shallow, they wouldn't just remove the soil, they'd also work the bedrock and that's to make the initial pit deeper. But if the bedrock surface was very deep under the soil, they would have dug their pit to a sufficient depth and then just poured in the terrazzo. This lime based mixture is like a concrete, with stones and sand added to it. As Carroll says, the terrazzo mixture was impermeable and this means that at least some of these buildings could have contained water, maybe the pillared enclosure at Karahantepe, which I believe was lined with terrazzo. One thing I've always said about sites like Gobekli and Karahantepe is that when archaeologists are excavating today, they're uncovering how these sites looked at the very end of their lives, after hundreds of years of occupation, of building renovations, building decommissions and subsequent burials. The archaeological site plan of Karahantepe does look incredibly intricate. We can see the outlines of all the buildings, but in the final stages of occupation at the site, Karahantepe could have looked very different. These three buildings could have all been decommissioned and filled in for hundreds of years while the settlement was still active. When this area was being built up, this part of it could have been flattened. Some of the pillars in these buildings could have been taken from here, then recarved and repurposed, because we do exactly the same thing today. We reuse and recycle useful materials. Walls were rebuilt many times, pillars were replaced and sometimes redecorated, and sometimes communal buildings stayed in the same place but got smaller, because new walls were rebuilt inside the older ones. And it's believed that this is because of damage from nature. Soil creep, slope slides, flash floods, earthquakes and so on. Being semi-subterranean structures, the walls would have always been subject to natural pressures and building new walls inside the older ones would have shored up buildings to make them last a bit longer. This is commonly seen at Gobekli Tepe, but it's also seen with Building AD at Karahantepe. Here you can see parts of the building marked with blue, green and yellow. The blue colour is the original building perimeter wall, phase 1, the green is the phase 2 and the yellow is the phase 3. Over time the building got smaller and smaller and it also changed shape. And with regards to the plan of the buildings, people often referred to advanced mathematics and sacred geometry. But because the buildings were always changing shape and size, I don't tend to pay too much attention, because it clearly wasn't important to them. With each phase of work, pillars were sometimes left in place, but more often than not the pillars moved inwards, i.e. they were reused as new roof supports. And obviously there was a real need to reimagine the communal buildings, at both Karahan and Gobekli Tepe. Over time and whether gradual or catastrophic, they were subject to natural forces. And eventually, it would be decided that buildings needed to be decommissioned. And that's the reason why some buildings are found to have been deliberately buried. Some people have misunderstood the so-called deliberate burial of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe, thinking that the entire site was filled in in one go and then the people just left. Because this is not correct. Both Gobekli and Karahan Tepe were lived in for a very, very long time and during this time, buildings were periodically decommissioned and new ones built in their place. Just like what happens in the modern world. After analysing the fill of some of the oval buildings at Gobekli Tepe, it's been noted that slopeslide events partly infilled the oval buildings with soil, waste material and masonry, as surrounding buildings, waste dumps and soil caved in. Maybe after the first few times you cleared out the buildings and reimagined the walls, but eventually you'd realise the problem was too big and it was time to decommission the building altogether. Once a building falls into disrepair and the time and resources required to fix the issue became inefficient, well, the building was abandoned. The old building was then completely filled in, maybe ceremonially or maybe not, and then new ones were built close by. For building AD at Karahan Tepe and also the pillared building AB, after analysing the sediment inside them, archaeologists believe they were purposefully filled in after being decommissioned. Karahan Tepe would have still been a large active settlement, maybe for many hundreds more years, but this area would have become flat ground, and maybe that's why this building was built on top of the hill. It appears that certain items like statues, plates, bowls and so on, were purposefully placed inside decommissioned buildings before they were filled in, which may indicate a ceremony, or at the very least, nostalgia. The most recent communal building to be excavated at Karahan Tepe is this rectangular structure in the heart of the site I mentioned in a recent video. Because of its shape, this would be a late phase communal building, and in his presentation, Nesmi Carroll also shows some pictures. One directly from above, and another aerial view but taken from an angle. And these pictures clearly come from larger site-wide aerial photos. And here's the first, and the rectangular building is right here, midway between the two large oval buildings. Interestingly, annotations on the photos seem to imply there's another rectangular building directly adjacent to it, which I assume will be excavated in the coming season. I also love this angled aerial view. And remember, in its heyday, the site may never have looked like this, because it's possible that these older structures were filled in before the more recent ones were made. Either way, Karahan Tepe was certainly a long-lived, complex site, and excavations are still very much in their early days. In his conference, Dr Carroll also mentioned colour. The wild boar statue that was found at Gobekli Tepe in recent years was found to have white, red and black colour pigments on its surface, indicating it was once painted. That makes it the oldest painted statue ever discovered, and if you want to learn more, I do have a video that's linked below. But if my translation of the conference is correct, he also said that paint pigments have also been found on standing stones as well, the pillars of communal buildings. And that is the first time I've heard this. What we see today as beige limestone settlements may have actually been places of vivid colour, making the animal reliefs on the pillars, the enormous statues and the murals like what we see at Sabert really come to life. Finding paint pigmentation really is another massive discovery, and it really changes our perception of the pre-pottery Neolithic. And there is also another new discovery I hadn't heard of until now. At Karahan Tepe, archaeologists have now found the world's oldest stairway. I've marked it on both of these photographs, a stone stairway that leads down into a semi-subterranean building. I believe the building is located here on the wider aerial view. It's long been assumed that structures of the pre-pottery Neolithic had wooden stairs and ladders, just like what's been found in recent years at the Neolithic to Chalcolithic site of Çatalhöyük. And yes, experts still believe that wooden stairs and ladders were used at Göbekli and Karahan Tepe, and of course these have long since perished. But in this building, by using stone we now have the oldest stairway ever discovered, yet another first for pre-pottery Neolithic Turkey. Dr Carroll spoke for around 90 minutes, and this video is just more than 20, and so I haven't mentioned everything he said. He presented so much incredible information in a short space of time, and I've really just re-presented the highlights. But I'll end by what he said about the future of Göbekli Tepe. Dr Carroll mentions the geophysics that took place in October 2025 on this patch of ground right here. I was lucky enough to watch one of the experts making the measurements on my visit last year. It has long been known that this part of the site contains more communal buildings, more of the famous oval buildings that hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to see each year. And Dr Carroll said that geophysics has indeed revealed the exact same type of structure, and some of them may even be larger than those under the canopy. Does that imply we could find a building of similar dimensions to Karahan Tepe's building AD? That would be absolutely incredible. These are the old geophysics results obtained more than 10 years ago. We can see there are structures below ground, and I can't wait to see the more detailed new results. And Carroll said that excavations will continue at Göbekli Tepe next year, and by removing the olive trees that were planted by former landowners, archaeologists now have access to a larger area. I could be wrong, as it wasn't easy to translate the conference, but I believe that he says that this year, 2026, he plans to start excavating this hollow right here, where geophysics indicates Göbekli Tepe's largest communal building is to be found. This would, of course, be absolutely epic. And the findings could, no, the findings will, change everything we thought we knew about Göbekli Tepe. The story is about to get more exciting. New buildings, new pillars, new art, new statues, and maybe a new way of viewing our ancient ancestors. Incredible new findings are found every year. For a few decades now, we've only been looking at the tip of the iceberg, but now it looks like we may get to see the iceberg itself. Thank you very much for watching this episode of Ancient Architects. If you enjoyed the video, please subscribe to the channel, please like the video and please leave a comment below. Thank you very much.