Denizli · Baklan Plain · Neolithic – Chalcolithic
A Neolithic mound on the Baklan Plain, holding the memory of villages built one upon another since the 7th millennium BC.
Excavated since 2015 11 seasons Director Prof. Dr. Fulya Dedeoğlu Konakçı
One mound. Nearly nine thousand years. Each village covered the one before it, and the earth rose layer upon layer.
In the village of Dayılar, in the Çal district of Denizli, at a strategic threshold where the basin floor of the Çivril and Baklan plains meets the natural route up to the Çal Plateau, rises a natural hill formed in the Neogene epoch. What turned it into a mound was not nature but people: the accumulation of villages built one upon another over thousands of years.
Ekşi Höyük illuminates the Neolithic period of the Upper Meander Basin. Systematic surveys by Eşref Abay and Fulya Dedeoğlu Konakçı across the plains and highlands identified 18 settlements dated to the 7th–6th millennia BC; excavations began in 2015 at Ekşi Höyük, the best preserved among them.
The evidence shows that the first village was founded in the first quarter of the 7th millennium BC. Its earliest phase is defined by red lime-plastered rectangular buildings dated to 6750–6600 BC, followed by apsidal buildings between 6400 and 6000 BC. Occupation continued, intermittently, until around 5500 BC; much later, in the 10th–11th century AD, the mound was reused as a cemetery. Seven distinct building levels have been documented so far.
The excavation seeks not merely to open a single layer, but to understand the Neolithisation of the basin — how the founding communities organised themselves, their subsistence strategies and their use of space. Work continues under Prof. Dr. Fulya Dedeoğlu Konakçı, with the permission of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the support of Ege University.
The Face of the Mound
A clay head of a few centimetres still carries the trace of the hands that shaped it: a pressed-in eye socket, a brow marked with a single line, ochre smeared with a fingertip. The figurines of Ekşi Höyük are the early village community's most direct testimony about itself.
The settlement's earliest phase is defined by red lime-plastered rectangular buildings. The first farming community of the Baklan Plain establishes the core of the mound.
Horseshoe-plan (apsidal) houses rise, some with ovens inside. The first phase of one apsidal house ended in fire and was carefully sealed — the rhythm of life pressed into the layers.
Although modern agriculture has eroded the upper layers, the evidence indicates that occupation continued, intermittently, into the Chalcolithic Age.
Thousands of years later, the abandoned mound is reused in the medieval period as a burial ground.
Following the surveys, the Ekşi Höyük Archaeological Excavation Project (EKAP) begins. Seven building levels have been documented over eleven seasons; work continues.
The Archaeology of the Millimetre
Every season, hundreds of drone frames are combined through photogrammetry into a centimetre-resolution digital elevation model of the mound. In the model below, colour encodes height — red is high, blue is low; the baulks and the hollow of the apsidal building can be read at a glance. As the soil is lifted — irreversibly changing the past — the memory of the dig is preserved in these records.
The excavations yield clay figurines, chipped-stone tools, sling bullets, bone tools and early pottery. In building levels 6 and 7, the densest find groups are animal bone and chipped stone; some areas point to bone-tool production, others to chipped-stone workshops. Every find is recorded with its drawing, photograph and stratigraphic context, so that the object is never severed from where it was found.
Ege University · Department of Archaeology
Has directed the Ekşi Höyük Archaeological Excavation Project (EKAP) since 2015.
Deputy Directors
2026 Season · Interdisciplinary research team
Led by the excavation team's bioarchaeologist Prof. Dr. Başak Boz (Trakya University, Department of Archaeology), this in-person programme focused on the field and laboratory methods for human skeletal remains. The free, 35-hour course was held in cooperation with the Ege University Continuing Education Centre (EGESEM).
The 2017–2018 seasons of Ekşi Höyük appeared among the proceedings of the 41st Excavation Results Symposium.
"First Results and Observations on the Neolithic Period of the Upper Meander Basin" was published in Arkeoloji Dergisi XXIV.
Following the surveys, systematic excavation work began at the mound.
AddressEge University, Faculty of Letters, Department of Archaeology
Bornova 35100 · İzmir, Türkiye
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InstitutionalThe Ekşi Höyük excavations are carried out on behalf of Ege University, with the permission of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
