Visit Boncuklu

You are welcome to visit any time of the year. Directions are given below. During our excavation season (July to September) you can see the excavation of Boncuklu in progress however please contact us in advance so we can plan to welcome your party. Send us an enquiry using the form below so that we know when you are going to arrive.

Boncuklu’s Visitor Centre provides information about the ancient remains and gives people an understanding about lifestyle in the Neolithic.

Open throughout the year, the Visitor Centre was jointly funded by Ethem Sancak/Hedef Alliance and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

A popular feature, because it gives visitors an instant idea of Neolithic life at Boncuklu, is the cartoon illustration on the large window which looks towards the hoyuk.
window-film-with-hoyuk

Inside the Visitor Centre are a series of graphic panels which provide an overview of the discovery of Boncuklu and explain what we find during excavation that lets us understand how people lived here 10,000 years ago.

The Visitor Centre leads into an interpreted environment with replica buildings and working areas set within a Neolithic garden. By using excavated house plans from Boncuklu as our design, we can offer visitors a first hand experience of neolithic houses. The replica houses were made in partnership with local builder or Usta, someone very experienced in making mudbricks, to a recipe based on inspecting excavated neolithic bricks and other modern experiments using different quantities of soil, marl and reed/straw. Neolithic people used the areas in-between their houses as places to work and process things as well as for rubbish disposal. We make use of these spaces to carry out experiments in order to test ideas about how Boncuklu people lived. For instance, we have butchered carcasses and cooked meat on a fire made with matted base of reeds.

Further plans

We have plans for the garden space around the replica houses and the Visitor Centre. It will be planted with examples of trees and plants from the Neolithic environment, evidence of which which we find is excavation, as well as other more modern types which have come into Turkey since the Neolithic. This will give us a chance to interpret key themes like environmental change and the spread of plants within a real outdoor environment space.

Another future development will be a interpreted pathway leading up from the Visitor Centre onto the höyük where they can see the neolithic remains of Boncuklu and back to the Visitor Centre. A small hillock in an otherwise flat landscape, the höyük provides a vantage point looking over the surrounding Konya Plain. From the top you can see the plain is carpeted with crops under irrigation agriculture, this is a big change from the Neolithic, when the plain was much wetter and there were lakes, ponds, rivers and lots of reeds. Visible on a clear day in the distance are the mountain ranges surrounding the plain. From the pathway you can see the remains of houses and work spaces and the pits cut for underfloor burials under excavation.

Exhibiting the excavated remains at Boncukklu outside our three-month-long summer excavation season would be possible through another more ambitious project to construct a protective shelter over the fragile remains and provide better equality of access for all visitors.

We look forward to welcoming you to Boncuklu Höyük!

 

Directions for travel by road:

Boncuklu is located on the outskirts of Hayıroğlu Village in Konya Province, central Turkey.

It is approximately 30km southeast of the city of Konya and 9.5km north of World Heritage Listed Çatalhöyük.

There are brown signs to follow on the Konya bypass and on the road to Hayıroğlu.

From Konya, drive along Saraçoğlu Caddesi through Erler and Abditolu to Hayıroğlu.

Drive through the village past the Belediye building and find the site on right hand side of the road at the edge of the village on the road to Ovakavağı.

1 Boncuklu sign with MustafaA large sign shows you the site and visitor centre location. At the garage/petrol station before the site ask to speak to the site guardian Mustafa Güven (left) for assistance.