25 Stone Turtles, Buried in a Cave 16,000 Years Ago
Archaeologists in Bilecik, northwest Türkiye, have recovered 25 small limestone turtles from Gedikkaya Hill and İn Cave in the district of İnhisar. Radiocarbon dates place them in the Epipaleolithic, between roughly 14,500 and 11,200 BC. The largest is about 30 cm long and 20 cm wide, and some were coated with clay. Most were shaped quickly and roughly, and they were found driven upright into the earth around a ring-shaped stone arrangement rather than scattered in occupation debris. Prof. Dr. Deniz Sarı, who led this season's dig for Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University, compares the gesture to the Hıdırellez custom of burying a written wish in the ground.
The stranger claim concerns their shape. According to the excavators, most of the figurines appear deliberately modeled on the profile of Gedikkaya Hill itself, which raises the possibility of an early mountain cult, though Sarı notes it may be too early to use that word for this period. The turtle was already present here: earlier seasons produced a votive pit deep inside the cave containing a stylized seated sandstone figurine and wall niches holding antlers, jawbones, a raptor talon, and tortoise shell. The symbolism runs wider still, from Upper Paleolithic contexts to the Natufian burial at Hilazon Tachtit in northern Israel, where a woman was laid out around 12,000 years ago with dozens of tortoise shells left from a funerary feast. Long life and endurance are the usual associations. The finds have gone to Bilecik Museum and the university for study, with no peer-reviewed publication yet.