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There's a new blog post at the Gobekli Tepe blog -- the website created and maintained by the researchers excavating the site. This post discusses the making and transport of the pillars that make up the site and is probably going to be interesting to those discussing how Egyptians moved and mined the blocks for the Great Pyramid.

It turns out that a lot of the blocks at GT weigh about as much as the blocks of the Great Pyramid. Like the Egyptians, they quarried stone that was close to the site they were building and like the Egyptians, there's unfinished work in those quarries.

The most interesting find was that they used the properties of limestone itself (which forms in nice layers, often a hard layer alternating with some softer layers) to create the stone blocks. They'd go to the edge of the plateau, find a lengthy seam of limestone, and simply chip it into block sized lumps (think of using the edge of a cake to make slices for everyone rather than cutting slices by digging a hole in the middle of the cake and cutting from there).

Details, discussion, papers, references at the blog

Byrd