I mean, who hasn’t carved and stacked ten-ton rocks into perfect form-fitting shape? Heck when i was but a wee lad, me and the boys would knock out fifty or sixty a day, down at ye olde Quarry ‘n Carry. Build huge town walls and knock ‘em down a week later. Then we’d invent agriculture and see who could spit the farthest.
Why do you think that’s difficult to do? You carve a rock into a shape, then you see what gaps there are between that shape and the other shapes and you carve another rock to fit it. And when you have hundreds of people in the quarry carving rocks and years to do it, it gets done.
Well sure - but in these pictures, look at the lower right one, say, there’s no rocks in-between, it’s just one bigass rock perfectly carved to fit another bigass rock, and so on. So at least it had to either be done before placement or using some sort of flexible template such that mortar wasn’t used. Which is pretty neat at least. And given the size, one expects it was an enormous PITA.
Of course it was done before placement. It couldn’t be done after placement. It’s really not hard to carve one shape of a rock to fit another shape of a rock given enough time and patience.
What is so funny to me is that these peoples achieved things like massive irrigation systems that enabled them to feed large populations and complicated textile processing and weaving, but these armchair archaeologists think that the wall is the important thing just because it’s the most prominent feature remaining.
People in this thread act as if the Romans were baboons.
No, people 4000 years ago were still people, i.e. they had roughly the same brains as we do. This means their creativity and intellect was pretty much the same as we have now; they were more than capable of inventing techniques to carve and move large rocks. They didn’t have modern technology, but they still had technology.
Also, building stuff by piling up rocks is so basic, it’s normal that it evolved in parallel on different continents. OP’s pic actually shows a few different solutions to the problem; some of them make neat rows while others are more “random” in their approach.
