Mendik Tepe: the ancient site rewriting human history

The 12,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey is often called the “zero point of history”, said The Archaeologist. But recent excavations at the nearby Mendik Tepe site suggest it dates back even further, and could offer “newer insights into humanity’s earliest steps toward settled life”.

‘Earliest stages’ of human settlement

Mendik Tepe (Mendik Hill or Peak) is in a rural area of southeastern Anatolia, about 130 miles east of the city of Şanlıurfa. It’s in this region that the first permanent human settlements are thought to have been established in the early Neolithic period. A Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry project called Taş Tepeler (Stone Hills) is overseeing architectural digs in the area.

Excavation at Mendik Tepe got under way last year, led by University of Liverpool archaeology professor Douglas Baird, working with the Şanlıurfa Archaeology Museum and the British Institute of Archaeology. According to the experts, said The Archaeologist, the site dates to “the earliest stages of the Neolithic Era”, when humans began to abandon “mobile foraging” for a more “sedentary lifestyle, possibly experimenting with plant cultivation”. The “site seems to capture the very beginnings of that transformation”, dating it to as much as 2,000 years before Göbekli Tepe, Baird told the magazine.

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‘Exciting’ look at Neolithic life

The excavations have already unearthed several buildings of various sizes, raising questions about their function and significance.

While structures excavated at Göbekli Tepe have massive T-shaped stone pillars, decorated with carvings of people and animals, the pillars on buildings at Mendik Tepe are smaller and not T-shaped. This suggests that the two communities “possessed a different ideology” or that Mendik Tepe “was constructed for different purposes”, said The Debrief.

The whole Taş Tepeler region is “particularly exciting” for archaeologists, Baird told the Turkish Anadolu Agency, because it allows for the study of “a network” of Neolithic settlements and their development “on a larger, regional scale”.