Archaeologists have unearthed five unusually small, 8,000-year-old clay figurines depicting men and women during ongoing excavations at Ulucak Mound in Türkiye’s western port city of Izmir, researchers announced Monday.
Measuring between 3 and 10 cm, the figurines are the first of their kind discovered at this scale, said Ozlem Cevik, head of the Ulucak excavations and a scholar at Trakya University’s Department of Protohistory and Near Eastern Archaeology.
Speaking to Demiroren News Agency, Cevik said, “We believe these figurines were used in household contexts, related to abundance, fertility, and transitional rituals,” such as birth, marriage, seasonal cycles, or shifts in social or spiritual status.
Cevik noted that the figurines were found together in a collective context inside a structure, not on the floor but in the fill above it, indicating they may have been hung to dry.
Radiocarbon dating of previously excavated sections places the structure between 6005 and 5840 BC, confirming the artifacts are about 8,000 years old.
