It is the normal condition of a site that is genuinely important and genuinely complex.

The Images That Wait in Darkness

Beneath the mound that rises from the limestone plateau of southeastern Türkiye, thousands of years of accumulated fill preserve structures that have not been seen or touched since the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.

In those structures, almost certainly, are more pillar arrangements, more carved animal images, and more evidence of the activities and practices that made this hilltop significant for the communities who came here across multiple generations.

The pillars that have been excavated — Pillar 18 with its carved arms and belt, the great Vulture Stone of Enclosure D, the procession of birds on other pillars, the snake coiling down another shaft — are a fraction of what was carved.