Aperçu
Gedikkaya Cave (registered as İn Cave) opens on the north slope of the rocky hill called İnkaya, about 1 km southeast of İnhisar in Bilecik province, northwestern Türkiye. The mouth faces the Sakarya Valley. It is about 6 m wide and 3.5 m high, at 354 m above sea level, roughly 180 m above the river and 125 m above the road. The cave runs about 180 m into Upper Jurassic-Lower Cretaceous Bilecik limestone; inner chambers reach 15-20 m in height and 30 m in width.
Occupation is not a single camp. Calibrated radiocarbon dates published by Deniz Sarı in Belleten (2024) place the earliest cultural layer around 14,500 BCE (Epipaleolithic) and the latest around 4,500 BCE (Middle Chalcolithic). Sparse Hellenistic sherds show later visitors from a settlement on the slopes below. A bone sample from mixed fills returned a radiocarbon age greater than 48,618 BP; whether that records an Upper Paleolithic stop on the modern-human dispersal into Eurasia is still unproven and needs wider excavation.
The Epipaleolithic layers include niches with animal bone (including tortoise shell), knapped stone, a pavement of flat slabs, and a special area about 40 m inside the entrance: two nested, crescent-shaped stone rings around a stalagmite whose top was flattened. Sarı treats that unit as an offering pit. A 2025 paper in Anatolian Research dates the symbolic assemblage in one layer to 13,166-11,200 cal BCE. Late Neolithic use is thin and sits near the 8.2 ka cooling event; early Chalcolithic architecture looks more seasonal than permanent.
Archaeological material inside the cave was first recorded in Sarı's 2017 Bilecik survey, after MTA geological visits (Rupprecht 1960; Nazik and colleagues 2001) had mapped the cave without noting the prehistoric fill. Rescue work under the Bilecik Museum ran from 2019 to 2023. In 2026 a 14-member university team excavated from 18 May to 18 July on behalf of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
