Hallan Çemi Höyüğü, also called Hallan Çemi Tepesi, lies fifty kilometres north of the centre of Batman. It is a low mound, four and a third metres high, set in a narrow valley on the west bank of the Sason Çayı, a tributary of the Tigris.
The dates proposed for it are what make the site remarkable: occupation between about 11,700 and 11,270 years ago, which would make this the oldest known settlement in Anatolia. The people who lived here were hunter-gatherers who had nonetheless stopped moving. Excavation turned up no sign of farming at all, but it did produce evidence that the domestication of the pig was already under way.
The site was found in 1990, during survey work by Michael Rosenberg and H. Toğul in the area that the Batman Dam was going to flood; a chipped-stone industry and decorated stone vessels came to light, and excavation followed between 1990 and 1994, led by Rosenberg with the University of Delaware, METU's centre for rescue archaeology and the Diyarbakır Museum. The layers belong to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A. At least four building phases are present and the upper three were dug far enough to show their architecture.
What those phases show is a village arranged around a hollow. At the centre of the settlement lies a natural pit fifteen metres across and a metre deep, with hut-like houses built around its rim. It served as a rubbish tip — it is thick with animal bone and broken stone — but it was more than that: it held a hut of its own in all three phases, and three sheep skulls with their horns still attached were found in it. The oldest of the excavated phases used sandstone blocks, and its two circular buildings, five to six metres across and roofed with branches, were dug partly into the ground; in front of each, a second semicircular wall with its own doorway stands about a metre out from the first.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Batman as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 2.6 °C in January to 30.3 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in March (76 mm) and lightest in July (2 mm). Long-term means for 1952-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
