Turkish diggers found a 9,000-year-old copper workshop at Cayonu

Excavators working at Çayönü Hill, in south-eastern Türkiye, have uncovered a purpose-built workshop where prehistoric craftspeople processed malachite and copper roughly 9,000 years ago. The find, dated to around 6900–6800 BC, gives archaeologists an unusually complete window into how one of the region’s most important Neolithic communities organised specialised production long before large-scale metallurgy existed.

The workshop sits in the western part of the ancient settlement, in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır province, and was uncovered during excavations carried out under permit from Türkiye’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The dig is led by Associate Professor Savaş Sarıaltun of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University.

A five-square-metre production floor

The workshop covers approximately five square metres and is built around a stone-paved working surface at its centre. Archaeologists identified at least six post holes surrounding the structure, a pattern that suggests the work area was once covered by a canopy or shelter rather than left exposed. Researchers say the layout points to a deliberately organised production space rather than an ad hoc spot where metalworking happened occasionally.

Forty-two pieces spanning raw ore to finished beads

Excavators recorded 18 malachite fragments at the centre of the workshop and a further 24 to 25 in the surrounding area, bringing the total number of malachite and copper finds to around 42 as the survey of the wider work area was completed. Crucially, the material spans every stage of production: raw malachite sits alongside partly processed pieces, finished malachite, copper beads and other worked copper objects. That range lets researchers reconstruct something rarer than a single artefact type, a full production sequence running from unworked stone through to a wearable finished object, all recovered from the same archaeological context. Investigators say that combination is what elevates the find beyond a simple cache of minerals: it captures raw material acquisition, intermediate processing and finished manufacture happening in one identifiable place, rather than scattered across a site with no way to link the stages together.

A craft tradition stretching back to 9100 BC

Evidence for copper and malachite use at Çayönü has previously been traced back to around 9100 BC, roughly 2,000 years before the newly identified workshop was in use. Türkiye’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, said in a statement announcing the find that the workshop shows the mining and working tradition at Çayönü persisted across that whole span, with production increasingly carried out in specific, specialised work areas rather than wherever raw material happened to be gathered. He described the site, which carries traces of some of humanity’s earliest major social transformations, as continuing to yield new evidence through scientific excavation.

Not yet metallurgy in the later sense

Researchers are careful to distinguish the Çayönü workshop from later metalworking traditions built around smelting and casting ore on an industrial scale. What the finds show instead is a much earlier relationship with naturally occurring copper minerals and native copper, worked cold or with simple heat rather than melted and cast. The significance lies less in any single object than in the fact that the architectural boundaries of the workspace survive alongside material from every stage of production, a combination that rarely turns up together at sites this old. The stone-paved surface at the centre of the workshop, together with the ring of post holes around it, indicates a space that was returned to repeatedly rather than improvised once and abandoned, which is part of why researchers describe the production here as organised rather than opportunistic.

Ceramics point to cultural continuity

The 2026 excavation season produced a second line of evidence for how Çayönü changed over time. In the settlement’s western section, researchers uncovered ceramic vessels associated with the Proto-Hassuna culture and the early Pottery Neolithic period, provisionally dated to around 6800–6600 BC. Radiocarbon dating and further archaeometric analysis are continuing to refine that chronology, and researchers hope the pottery will help clarify how communities at Çayönü absorbed new materials and technologies as the settlement’s copper-working tradition matured. Taken together with the workshop, the ceramic evidence places the 2026 season among the more informative in recent years at the site, giving researchers two independent threads, metalworking and pottery production, to compare as they reconstruct how daily life and craft practice changed at Çayönü across the centuries.

One of Southwest Asia’s key Neolithic sites

Çayönü has long been studied as a site where communities underwent major shifts in how they lived, farmed, built and organised labour during the Neolithic period. The newly documented workshop adds craft specialisation to that picture, showing that by 6900–6800 BC, mineral working at the site had moved beyond casual collection of useful stone toward a designated space staffed, in effect, by people with particular skills. As reporting on the find has noted, the discovery gives archaeologists a rare opportunity to study not just what Neolithic craftspeople made, but where and how they organised the work of making it, a question that is usually much harder to answer from scattered finds alone.

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