The Bedrock Mortars at Şika Rika 5
Thirty newly identified sites in Türkiye’s Mardin region complicate the familiar map of how settled life began. At one of them, mortars are carved directly into the bedrock.
The Location
At Şika Rika 5 in south-eastern Türkiye's Mardin region, the ground itself holds the clue: mortars cut into bedrock. An Antiquity journal report from March 2026 describes this site among 30 newly identified Late Epipalaeolithic locations. The researchers place the broader period at about 12,000–10,000 BC.
What's There
The team found flint and obsidian tools with Late Epipalaeolithic forms. Grinding stones and mortars, including bedrock examples, point to processing grains and legumes. Those fixed installations support the researchers' interpretation of occupation at Şika Rika 5; the tools alone do not tell us the length of every stay.
- Mapped setting: the Mardin region, outside the more intensively studied Upper Tigris Valley.
- Physical clues: chipped-stone tools and installations for grinding food.
- Unresolved: how each settlement related to its neighbours over time.
The History
Accounts of early sedentary life often centre on the Tigris and Euphrates or a movement eastward from the Mediterranean. The new survey extends the map. The authors suggest settled lifeways may also have emerged locally, rather than arriving along a single route. This does not establish one birthplace for farming or make Şika Rika 5 a previously unknown city.
The Mystery
Why did people invest in grinding installations here, and how did these communities connect to later Neolithic settlements? More dating and site-by-site study can test whether these places were occupied together and for how long. The honest surprise is not a lost civilization. It is a map of early settlement with more dots than we had drawn.
Sometimes a new chapter in human history begins with a hole in the rock.