Archaeologists who reopened a trench at the prehistoric settlement of Çayönü Tepesi in Diyarbakır’s Ergani district in Turkey uncovered physical evidence of a 5,000-year-old earthquake: a mud-brick wall more than five meters long that had toppled northward into a room yet remained intact on the floor.
“The orientation and pattern of the fallen wall indicated that it was destroyed by an earthquake—probably a tremor that originated north of Çayönü,” said excavation geophysicist Savaş Sarıaltun, according to Newsam. He added that the bricks shifted uniformly, suggesting a sudden but moderate jolt whose epicenter lay away from the mound.
“The building was abandoned before the quake. We found no household items or traces of fire,” Sarıaltun continued. He noted that the bricks’ uniform reddish tone came from local iron-rich soil rather than heat exposure.
Fieldwork is managed jointly by Çanakkale University of Applied Sciences and Iran’s Zanjan Kale University. Associate Professor Savaş Sarıalioğlu, the project’s field director, explained that no burned debris, charcoal, or domestic refuse appeared beneath the collapsed slab, and the pottery recovered matched the structure’s construction phase. “The layers of twelve or thirteen mud-brick courses fell northward as a single mass,” said Sarıalioğlu in remarks published by Arkeonews. Because the wall remained cohesive, he concluded that the tremor was neither very close nor very strong. A 2022 geological survey detected no active fault beneath the mound, but the team suspects movement along the Elazığ–Sivrice zone to the north transmitted enough energy to topple the structure.
Çayönü Tepesi, first settled about 12,000 years ago, played a central role in humanity’s shift to sedentary life, plant and animal domestication, and organized architecture. Evidence from the newly opened Early Bronze Age layers—roughly the third millennium BCE—showed that occupation continued well past the Neolithic period, linking the community with the rise of urban society.
The discovery also broadened Turkey’s historical earthquake catalogue. Comparable collapse horizons have been recorded at Salat Tepe near Bismil, where sequences of quakes between 2300–2200 BCE and 1600 BCE left similar damage. “Çayönü tells not only about the first farmers but also about how they endured earthquakes—the same phenomenon Turkey faces today,” Sarıaltun said.
While no fault scarp cuts across Çayönü Hill itself, the intact slab, its northward lean, and the absence of combustion residues offered a rare glimpse into the region’s seismic past. Ongoing trenches are exploring both Neolithic and Early Bronze Age contexts, and laboratory analysis of building materials, pottery fabric, and micro-sediments aims to determine the season of the earthquake and whether residents vacated the house for related or unrelated reasons. The mud-brick sheet that still lies where it fell five millennia ago remains a direct record of the forces that shaped southeastern Anatolia and of the people who first cultivated its iron-rich soil.
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