Karahan Tepe quarry on 30-degree slope holds unfinished T-pillar

October 09, 2026TürkiyeGeneralShare

▶

Key facts

• An unfinished T-pillar was found on the western slope of the main hill at Karahan Tepe, a slope of about 30 degrees.
• The Karahan Tepe pillar measures 4.5 m long, 1.5 m wide and 80 cm thick, roughly half the size of the unfinished Gobekli Tepe pillar.
• Around it, the trench cut with flint tools is 40 cm wide and 1 m deep, while the rock on one side of the pillar was chiselled away.
• The extraction technique at Karahan Tepe matches that at Gobekli Tepe; the local limestone is more steeply inclined and heavily fractured by dissolution along joints and bedding planes, which also makes it easier to work when saturated.
• Karahan Tepe is the same age as Gobekli Tepe and was built during a wet climate, when saturated limestone was easier to cut.
• The presenter notes an apparently empty extraction pit of the same shape and size directly beside the unfinished pillar, overgrown with grass, along with linear man-made features across the area.
• He argues the Karahan Tepe quarry sits a one-minute walk or less from the settlement, and proposes that pillars received their final finishing closer to or inside the settlement.
• Quarries have also been identified at Sefertepe and at Sayburc, the latter close to the famous narrative relief carving on the bench of a communal building; the small Sayburc quarry with regular blocks is suggested to be Roman.

← All stories

AI-generated text · images from the original sources · always verify with the sources.