Karahantepe Archaeological Site

Karahantepe sits about 55 km from central Şanlıurfa on one of the limestone rises of Tek Tek Mountains National Park. The Tek Tek Mountains form a flat plateau roughly 60 km long between the Harran and Viranşehir plains, up to 761 metres above sea level in the north and dropping below 500 metres in the south.

The limestone here comes in slabs. That gave builders both a construction material and the raw stone for the T-shaped pillars found at Karahantepe and at other sites of the same period. Surface surveys and geomagnetic readings point to four distinct areas.

The western and eastern terraces show the tops of T-shaped pillars on the surface, and round buildings of different sizes can be traced from how the pillars are arranged. The Southern Plain has no pillar-like remains and more objects tied to houses, such as grinding stones. The Quarries are where pillars were cut on the terraces of the western cone. The ministry notes these divisions rest mainly on surface data, but the local topography and bedrock support them.