ORIGINAL ARTICLE Ancient Isaura Quarries in and Around Zengibar Castle (Bozkır, Konya), Central Anatolia, Turkey Mehmedi Vehbi Gökçe 1 & İsmail İnce 2 & Cengiz Okuyucu 2 & Osman Doğanay 3 & Mustafa Fener 4 Received: 10 April 2020 /Accepted: 22 July 2020 # The European Association for Conservation of the Geological Heritage 2020 Abstract Zengibar Castle was built by the Isaurian during antique ages on the summit of Mount Asar, approximately 20 km west of the town of Bozkır, Konya, Turkey. The aims of this study are to determine the lithological, petrographic, and mechanical charac- teristics of the building stones that were used to construct the walls and buildings in Zengibar Castle in order to determine the quarrying techniques of these stones and to determine which structures they were used in. A number of antique quarries of various sizes were located in Isaura, four of which produced a significantly higher volume of building stones. These antique quarries were mostly located on hillsides in carbonate rock of the Late Triassic Dutdere formation located in the Bolkardağı Units and were run phase by phase. The porosity range of the rocks was found to be between 0.85 and 0.90% and the dry density and uniaxial compressive strength were found to range from 2.67 to 2.68 g/cm 3 and 83.10 to 96.60 MPa, respectively. The results of this study suggest that the stones that were quarried in these quarries were used as the main building material or flooring material in various constructions in Zengibar Castle, including religious buildings such as temples and chapels, social buildings such as dwellings, theaters, baths, fountains, and cemeteries, defense and security structures such as watchtowers, fortification walls, and city gates, in monumental tombs, and in stones in which reliefs and inscriptions were carved. Keywords Antique quarry . Building stone . Isaura . Zengibar Castle Introduction Locating antique quarries from which building stones of works with historical and cultural heritage importance were obtained, and defining their index and mechanical character- istics, is essential to allow the appropriate materials to be cho- sen for reconstruction efforts thus to have them transferred to future generations (Martínez-Martínez et al. 2017). Using stones with different textural, index, and mechanical charac- teristics from the original building materials in the restoration and reconstruction of historical monuments can considerably damage historical and cultural heritage. This has prompted many researchers to locate quarries from which the building stones of historic cultural monuments were obtained in order to study their characteristics and degradation processes (Sutherland and Sutherland 2002; Garcia-Valles et al. 2002; Melfos 2008; Carò and Sokrithy 2012; Martínez-Martínez et al. 2017). On the other hand, some researchers have inves- tigated the operational techniques of the antique quarries (Coli et al. 2011). The ancient geographical region of Isauria is defined as the northern parts of the Taurus Mountains facing the Konya Plain. This ancient region covers an area of approx- imately 10,000 km 2 and falls within the modern administra- tive borderlines of the current Turkish provinces of Konya, Karaman, Antalya, and Mersin (Fig. 1). In historical records, the term Isaura was first coined in the Early Hellenistic Period by Diodoros. The remains of the most important settlements of Isaura are located in Zengibar Castle. Within this context, the aim of this study is to locate the quarries from which the building stones used in the construction of Zengibar Castle were obtained and to determine the basic characteristics of these stones, such as lithological, petrographic, index, and * Mehmedi Vehbi Gökçe mvehbi@gmail.com 1 Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University, Niğde, Turkey 2 Department of Geological Engineering, Konya Technical University, Konya, Turkey 3 Department of Archaeology, Aksaray University, Aksaray, Turkey 4 Department of Geological Engineering, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Geoheritage (2020) 12:69 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-020-00498-9