The first intact graves at Göbekli Tepe show the pit was reopened and the bones rearranged

After three decades of digging at Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists have found the first two intact burials at the site, and one of them shows a pit that was opened again and again, with the skulls of at least three people gathered in a single corner. Julia Gresky and Lee Clare of the German Archaeological Institute report in PLOS One that the bones inside were deliberately rearranged between interments.

The graves date to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, about 8700 to 8000 BC. They give the excavators a comparison they never had before for the hundreds of loose human bone fragments scattered through the site’s monumental buildings. Excavation there is a Turkish-German collaboration that the institute describes as running for more than three decades, on a hilltop in southeastern Turkey that has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A kidney-shaped pit under a plaster floor

The first grave, found in trench DR1, is a kidney-shaped pit cut beneath a plaster floor in a rectangular dwelling. It held at least three people: a woman over 35, a man aged 20 to 30 and a girl aged 11 to 14, according to HeritageDaily’s account of the paper. The three did not lie where they had been placed. Skulls were gathered together in the southeastern corner and the long bones arranged along the walls of the pit, which the authors read as evidence that the bones had been deliberately rearranged and the grave reopened to receive new burials.

Reopening a pit means breaking through the plaster floor above it, moving what is already there and laying down the next person, a sequence of decisions made over time rather than a single funeral. The evidence for it is the layout itself: the skulls sat together while the other bones formed separate groupings, an order that bodies decaying undisturbed would not produce. The DAI describes the bones as clustered in different areas of the pit, suggesting the dead were repositioned after their first placement.

A young woman on fist-sized stones

The second burial looks different. A woman aged 20 to 30 lay on her left side in a flexed posture, facing east, resting on fist-sized stones without a clearly defined pit, per ZME Science’s summary. Her skeleton stayed largely in place, though the long bones were severely fragmented. The paper’s full text assigns the two graves to different trenches, and the contrast between them is part of the argument: the site’s residents used more than one way of burying their dead, and neither form resembles the piles of broken fragments that earlier seasons kept recovering from the building fills.

Both skeletons carried the damage that anthropologists had been puzzling over for years. The bones were broken, coated in calcium-rich crusts and marked by rodent gnawing. Archaeology magazine notes that these are the same traits seen in the fragments recovered from the fill of the buildings.

Slope movement versus a ritual of scattering

Human bone has turned up at Göbekli Tepe since excavation began in 1995, and it has been hard to explain. Gresky and Clare set the two graves beside 928 loose fragments recovered from the site. The fragments come from both sexes and all ages and are spread across roughly 3,000 square meters, according to ZME, which is not the clustering that deliberate ritual deposits would tend to produce.

The paper proposes an alternative. Lower-lying parts of the site were inundated by slope deposits from higher ground, the German Archaeological Institute’s release says, and fragmented bones from displaced burials could have been carried downhill into the monumental structures as settlement fill shifted. In the ZME summary the team describes “heavy fragmentation, calcium-rich crusts and occasional rodent gnawing” as common to both the scattered pieces and the intact skeletons. Similar damage patterns point to a shared history of burial and decay.

The interpretation has consequences for how the site is read. UNESCO, which inscribed Göbekli Tepe in 2018, lists it as a set of monumental enclosures with T-shaped limestone pillars built by hunter-gatherers between 9600 and 8200 BC, and describes evidence of social rituals, likely funerary. Graves inside a dwelling under a plaster floor suggest that people also lived there. Archaeology magazine reports the authors reaching that conclusion, in contrast to the older picture of a place used only for periodic ritual gatherings.

The paper does not close the skull question. Five individuals in the collection show deliberate skull modification with deep grooves, one of them drilled, and Archaeology Magazine reports that the study acknowledges those marks could reflect additional burial customs. Its authors say further investigation and direct dating are needed to establish when such practices occurred, which leaves the timing of the skull modifications, and whether it overlaps with the two graves, undetermined.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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