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important early Neolithic site at Çayönü Tepesi, located 4 miles (6 kilometers) southwest of the town of Ergani, northwest of the city of Diyarbakır. Having thrived, in the main, between ca. 8630 BC and 6820 BC, Çayönü is noted for the discovery there of a series of rectangular buildings with distinctive “grill-plan” subfloors composed of low, parallel walls of stone, possibly to allow air to pass freely beneath the main flooring. Here too was found some of the earliest evidence for the use of copper, beaten into shape, not smelted, along with evidence of animal husbandry in the form of pig domestication and the earliest known use of linen fabric, a piece being found still wrapped around an antler.
    The site’s lead excavators, American archaeologist and anthropologist Robert J. Braidwood (1907–2003) and Turkish academic Dr. Halet Çambel, also came across other examples of advanced building design and technical achievement at Çayönü. In addition to the grill-plan floors, one structure, dubbed the Flagstone Building, was found to possess a floor of polished limestone slabs up to 6.5 feet (2 meters) in length. Two tall stone pillars stood in the center of the room, with rows of orthostats (stone posts) set up against the interior walls. 4
    Another structure, known as the Terrazzo Building, bore a slightly different, although no less impressive, style of flooring. It consisted of a 16-inch (40 centimeter)-thick setting of terrazzo, a hard, polished surface made from burnt and crushed lime and clay, stained red with a substance called ochre. Into this, two parallel rows of white pebbles had been inserted to create a linear design of simple beauty. Orthostats again lined the interior walls, while a pair of standing stones, like those in the Flagstone Building, had been set up in the middle of the room.
    Prior to the discovery of Çayönü, the use of orthostats had been found in just a few rare instances. For instance, at a proto-Neolithic site in northern Iraq named Qermez Dere, located on a south-facing mountain slope overlooking a vast desert expanse known as the Jezirah, stone pillars, their tops carved into the likeness of human shoulders and arms, were found to have stood at the center of two circular buildings with plaster floors. Both structures provided dates in the region of the early tenth millennium BC. 5
    SANGUINE DISCOVERIES
    In one of the enclosures at Çayönü archaeologists discovered, both in the walls and beneath the floor, human skulls belonging to around seventy individuals. In one pit excavators came across large numbers of disarticulated human bones, most of them long bones, which, along with the skulls, suggested the presence of no less than 450 individuals. What fate had befallen them, and under what circumstances, remains unclear.
    Unsurprisingly, this apparent mortuary structure, which had a round apse at its northern end, became known as the Skull Building, although it was what excavators found on an enormous cut and polished stone slab, 1.1 U.S. tons (about 1 metric tonne) in weight and set up like an altar table, that most disturbed them. On its surface were clear traces of blood from aurochs (an extinct species of wild cattle) and humans, in the form of crystals and hemoglobin. 6 Equally disturbing was the discovery next to the stone slab of a vicious-looking flint knife, like something out of an Aztec temple.
    Some pressing questions arise regarding the presence of human blood inside Çayönü’s cult buildings. Was it the result of human sacrifice or autosacrifice, personal blood-letting like that practiced in pre-Columbian times among Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Aztec and Maya? Perhaps the matter is best left alone until a much clearer picture emerges of what was really going on here. Yet whatever the answer, it would seem that, during the early Neolithic age, beauty, sophistication, and advances in technology and architectural design went hand in hand with dark,