Çayönü: a 9,000-year-old malachite and copper workshop

Barely five square metres, a stone-paved floor, six post holes that probably held up a canopy, and, scattered across the surface, fragments of a deep green mineral. On the mound of Çayönü, in south-eastern Türkiye, archaeologists have uncovered a workshop where, around 9,000 years ago, craftspeople worked malachite and copper. Announced on 1 September 2026 by the Turkish Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, the discovery sheds light on one of the earliest stages in the history of metallurgyMetallurgyThe techniques of extracting and working metals (copper, bronze, gold); its rise in the EneolithicEneolithicThe "Stone-and-Copper Age": a transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age (c. 5000–3000 BC in south-eastern Europe), marked by the first copper objects, large farming settlements and, in places, the rise of fortified sites. Broadly synonymous with Chalcolithic.→ and Bronze AgeBronze AgePeriod of late prehistory marked by bronze metallurgy and the rise of maritime trade, beginning in the Near East around 3300 BCE.→ transformed tools, weapons and social hierarchies.→.¹²

The excavations are led by Savaş Sarıaltun, associate professor at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. The workshop, dated to around 6900 to 6800 BC, lies in the western part of the site.¹

Çayönü, a Neolithic village at the foot of the Taurus

Çayönü lies in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır province, in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains, on the banks of a tributary of the Tigris. Occupied for almost two millennia, from around 8600 to 6800 BC according to the most widely cited dates, it is one of the best-studied villages of the Near Eastern NeolithicNeolithicThe "New Stone Age": a period marked by farming, herding, settlement and pottery, from around 10,000 BC.→. It spans the whole Pre-Pottery Neolithic, or PPNPre-Pottery NeolithicThe first phase of the Neolithic (c. 9,600–6,900 BC), before the invention of pottery.→, sequence up to the beginnings of pottery.³

Excavations began in 1964 as a joint programme of the universities of Istanbul and Chicago, directed by Halet Çambel and Robert Braidwood. They revealed a remarkable succession of house types: first round huts, then rectangular "grill-plan" buildings set on parallel stone foundations, then channelled, cobble-paved, cell-plan and finally large-room houses. This architectural evolution goes hand in hand with one of the greatest transformations in human history: the shift from a life of hunting and gathering to village life based on farming and herding. The excavations, later continued by Mehmet and Aslı Özdoğan, also uncovered a building with a "terrazzo" floor where stelae comparable to the T-shaped pillars of Göbekli TepeGöbekli TepeSite in southern Turkey, the oldest known monumental sanctuary, raised around 9,600 BCE by hunter-gatherers.→ once stood, one of them bearing a carved human face.³

A specialised workshop

The workshop found in 2026 stands out clearly from the domestic spaces of the site. Its dimensions are modest, around five square metres, but its layout betrays a specific function. At the centre is a stone-paved working surface. All around it are at least six post holes, which probably supported a light roof to shade the workers from the sun.¹²

For the archaeologists, this space seems to have been purpose-built for specialised production.¹ It is not a corner of a house where a bead was occasionally shaped, but a dedicated place, perhaps used by people with particular skills. It is one of the earliest signs of craft specialisation in mineral working.

Working malachite is a delicate task. The mineral is relatively soft, but it breaks easily along its bands, and turning a raw lump into a regular bead requires patience: the piece has to be roughed out, ground on an abrasive stone, polished and then drilled, often with a fine stone bit turned by hand or with a bow drill. The paved surface found at the heart of the workshop may have served precisely as a solid, stable base for these operations. The fine green dust produced in the process may also have been collected and used as a pigment, as it was elsewhere in the ancient Near EastNear EastA region of western Asia (Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Iran), cradle of the Neolithic revolution, agriculture, the first cities and writing.→, for colouring objects or perhaps the skin.

Forty-two fragments of malachite

The excavators first collected eighteen pieces of malachite at the centre of the workshop, then some twenty more in and around the structure. In all, the malachite and copper pieces from the working area number around forty, 42 according to the count released by the ministry.¹²

Most interesting is the variety of these pieces. They include raw malachite, partly worked fragments, finished pieces, copper beads and other copper objects.¹ Found together in one place, they make it possible to reconstruct a true production sequence, from raw material to finished object. The craftspeople of Çayönü did not simply collect colourful stones: they selected, broke up, polished and drilled them on the spot.²

Copper before metallurgy

Malachite is a copper mineral. Its green colour, often veined with concentric bands, makes it a highly prized ornamental stone. In nature it is often found together with native copper, that is, pure metallic copper occurring as nuggets or threads in certain rocks. And the Ergani region is rich in copper ore: a major deposit, worked until modern times, lies some twenty kilometres from Çayönü.

The inhabitants of Çayönü were working malachite and copper from around 9100 BC, according to Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy.¹ This knowledge was therefore maintained at the site for almost two thousand years. At that time it was not yet metallurgy in the strict sense: ore was not smelted to extract the metal. Native copper was cold-hammered, and perhaps heated to make it less brittle, a process called annealing. It was made into beads, pins, awls and small hooks, objects that were small but highly distinctive.

These objects are among the oldest copper objects known in the world. They precede by several millennia the smelting and casting of metal, which would develop in the ChalcolithicChalcolithicThe "Copper Age": a transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, marked by the first copper objects (Ötzi's era).→ from the 5th millennium BC onwards. But they show that the first villagers of the Fertile CrescentFertile CrescentAn arc-shaped region of the Near East (LevantLevantA region of the eastern Mediterranean Near East (Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan), a major crossroads of the first human migrations out of Africa.→, Mesopotamia) where farming and herding first emerged.→ had already observed and exploited the unusual properties of this material: malleable, shiny, unlike any stone they knew.¹

A laboratory of domestication

If Çayönü is of such interest to prehistorians, it is also because it allows the birth of farming and herding to be observed layer by layer. From the earliest phases of occupation, the inhabitants grew emmer and einkorn wheat, two of the earliest domesticated cereals of the Near East.³

Herding took hold more gradually. In the oldest levels, the bones of hunted wild animals are plentiful. Domestic animals appear only at the end of the Pre-Pottery period. Sheep were the first to be domesticated, and Çayönü may be one of the places where the pig was first domesticated. Cattle, abundant from the start, kept their wild size for a long time before becoming smaller from around 7000 BC, a classic sign of domestication.³ The malachite workshop therefore belongs to a village that was already thoroughly agricultural, able to feed craftspeople busy with something other than producing food.

The Skull Building

Çayönü is not only a site of early metalworking. It is also famous for an exceptional building known as the "Skull Building". In this structure with its unusual plan, rebuilt several times, excavators found the remains of several hundred individuals, including many skulls gathered in cells.

This building bears witness to complex funerary and ritual practices, reminiscent of the treatment of skulls seen at other Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in the Near East. It shows that the community of Çayönü had collective places devoted to the dead and the ancestors, alongside its houses and workshops. This combination of technical innovation, elaborate architecture and collective ritual is found at other contemporary sites in the region, such as Göbekli Tepe and Nevalı Çori.

Proto-Hassuna pottery

The 2026 excavation season yielded another important discovery. In the western part of the site, archaeologists uncovered high-quality ceramic vessels linked to the early phases of the Pottery Neolithic and to the so-called Proto-Hassuna culture. They are provisionally dated to around 6800 to 6600 BC, and radiocarbon and archaeometric analyses are under way to refine this chronology.¹²

The Hassuna culture, named after a site in northern Iraq, is one of the first pottery-making cultures of Mesopotamia. Finding pottery close to this tradition at Çayönü confirms that the site took part in the networks of exchange and influence that linked the Anatolian highlands to the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates.

The malachite workshop and this early pottery date to roughly the same period. Together, they show a village in full transformation at the end of the 8th millennium BC, where new techniques, new skills and new forms of work organisation appeared side by side.

The beginnings of specialisation

The discovery of the workshop raises a key question: who worked here? In the first village societies, most tasks were probably shared among all members of the community. The appearance of spaces reserved for one particular activity, like this small malachite workshop, suggests that some people acquired expertise and devoted part of their time to it.¹

For archaeologists, this specialisation is one of the foundations of the complex societies that would later emerge in the Near East. Metalworkers in particular would play a central role in the cities of Mesopotamia and Anatolia. The Çayönü workshop is obviously not yet a forge, but it is a distant ancestor of one.

The green mineral handled by these craftspeople nine thousand years ago was, for them, simply a beautiful stone, good for making beads. They could not have known that by hammering the small copper nuggets they found with it, they were opening the way to one of humanity's major technical revolutions: the age of metals, which millennia later would transform farming, warfare, trade and art.