At Karahantepe, an 11,000-year-old statue, and a Roman wreck coated in pitch and wax

Two archaeological announcements a few days apart, both with the same verification problem: the news exists, but the documentation supporting it is not publicly available.

Karahantepe, a composite sculpture

Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced on August 25, 2026, the discovery, during the 2026 excavation season at the Neolithic site of Karahantepe, in southeastern Turkey, of a sculpture roughly 70 centimeters tall dating back approximately 11,000 years. It depicts a human figure seated on the back of a leopard.

The most interesting detail of the announcement is not the subject but the position. According to the statement, the sculpture would have remained in the spot where it was placed in the Neolithic period: resting on a seat set against the perimeter wall of a room roughly three meters wide, whose floor was covered with flat slabs. An object found in its original location is worth, for archaeologists, far more than an isolated object: it allows the relationship between the sculpture, the space that contained it, and the use of that space to be read.

The news currently comes from a single source (the announcement by Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, picked up by the specialized outlet Arkeonews); no independent confirmation is available. No laboratory dating, excavation report, or peer-reviewed study has been published to date. The chronological attribution of approximately 11,000 years ago is the one indicated in the ministerial announcement.

The wreck and the pollen

The second case concerns a Roman ship wreck approximately 2,200 years old. A team of researchers analyzed the hull coatings, finding the use of pine pitch and, on one section of the hull, a mixture of pitch and beeswax. The research was released on August 21, 2026.

The most methodologically notable element is the use of pollen grains trapped in the coatings as a tracer to reconstruct the origin of the materials. Pitch, in order to be applied, is heated: the pollen embedded in it records the plant environment in which the material was produced and processed. It is a geographic clue that comes not from the ship’s wood or its cargo, but from the substance used to make it watertight.

Here too, the news currently comes from a single source (the press release from the research institution behind the study, distributed via ScienceDaily); no independent confirmation is available. The available information does not indicate the location where the wreck was found, the journal of publication, the size of the sample analyzed, or the geographic origin actually identified by the pollen.

Why they matter together

The two stories belong to different categories of knowledge. The first is an object: a discovery, announced by a political authority before being announced by a scientific journal. The second is a method: an analytical technique applied to a material that is usually described rather than interrogated.

In the first case, what is awaited is the excavation report and the dating; in the second, the full publication of the study, with the palynological data and attribution criteria. Until then, both remain well-documented announcements, not consolidated findings.

The next verifiable step is documentary in both cases: the publication of the 2026 excavation season at Karahantepe by the responsible institutions, and the full text of the wreck research with the indication of its publishing venue.

Sources: Arkeonews, ScienceDaily.