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.
To this person’s credit, the rate that the Inca developed advanced stone masonry techniques is considered a bit of a mystery. It’s believed that they got them from another culture. That also had very advanced masonry techniques. The mysterious part of it is that both cultures don’t have any developmental history.
There is no “believed” about it, and there is a lot of developmental history, so I don’t know why you’re saying that.
For example, there’s Tiwanaku. There are many sites preceding it and post-dating it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwanaku
There were a huge number of Andean civilizations that came before the Inca and many of them had plenty of experience working stone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Andean_civilizations
The Inca were just the last in a long line of civilizations in that area.
Furthermore, carving and stacking stones doesn’t take a genius.
I think your under estimating how incredibly good at “stacking stones” these cultures where.
Protzen, Jean-Pierre. "Inca Quarrying and Stone Cutting."Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 44.2 (1985): 161-182. Print
Protzen, Juan-Pierre. “Who Taught the Inca Stonemasons Their Skills? A Comparison of Tiahuanaco and Inca Cut- Stone Masonry.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 56.2 (1997): 146-167
Here is my source material. In it it goes over the extreme tolerances and incredible craftsmanship of the Inca and Tiahuanaco. It’s not like laying brick or stone masonry (also difficult) we do with mortar today.
Also these structures are made by a bunch of people working over years and in the Incas over vast distances. All done with out written language or at least one we fully understand. (I am aware of quipu) So they had the infrastructure and advanced enough society to train and standardize there building techniques.
Tiahuanaco are considered more advanced than the Inca and their collapse predated the founding of the Inca empire by roughly 600 to 500 years. Not saying they couldn’t of provided some sort of inspiration for the Inca. But it also makes them more impressive and proves my point.
You should actually read the wiki if you’re going to cite it.
Feel free to explain it then. Which is it going to be, Aliens or Aryans from Atlantis?
No.
A decade or so ago, we owned a small rural house in Pennsylvania where the roads in the area were lined with 5’ high stone walls. Turns out, about a hundred years before, a rich family (for whom there were towns in the area named) had built themselves a giant stone mansion nearby, and to do so, they imported a bunch of Italian stone masons, and built little houses for them in the surrounding lands. To keep them busy when they weren’t working on the mansion (or whatever other projects they were doing), they had them build all of these roadside walls.
Everything was dry laid. No morter, nothing. Just rocks, stacked in top of one another. Not even particularly regularly shaped; they just jigsawed them together. The walls were 5’ high, 2’ across at the top and maybe 3’ at the base, and they lined every road for miles around. And this was the busywork these guys did.
I’m most places, these walls had stood unmoving for decades - again, with no morter or joining. When we bought our place, some previous owner wanted an actual driveway instead of just a road to the barn and had simply pushed a hole through the wall with a bulldozer and left these giant stones alongside the driveway.
A few years in, we hired some local Amish guys to use the stone to build proper end-cap pillars for the driveway. Those guys also did not use morter, except on the caps to make little roofs. They just lego’d the pillars out of the left-over stone, and we got a small discount for letting them take whatever they hadn’t used. I have no idea what these stones weighed, but certainly several hundred pounds each. The work crew was 3 guys, and no heavy machinery. They arrived in a pickup truck, were dropped off, and were picked up at the end of the day (it did take them a couple of weeks to do the job). They partially deconstructed the ends of the wall to integrate the pillars; it looked all of a piece at the end.
I think you greatly underestimate people’s ability to stack rocks, especially healthy, fit men used to labor.
P.S. I’m not saying it doesn’t take skill; I couldn’t have done it, even when in my prime; not well anyway. Not the first time. But none of those ziggurats were anyone’s first time stacking rocks.
First of all, a monolith is a single rock, not stacked rocks. Hence the word mono.
Secondly, any carved rock, being a rock, is likely to last thousands of years.
What you’re trying to say is that it is not easy nor is it trivial to stack rocks tightly like that. But it is both given enough time and manpower.
Sorry… are you saying that if I were a stonemason, I would be correct? As if that’s some sort of job that hasn’t existed since antiquity?
Remarkable feats of engineering that are recreated by children every day with blocks of wood.
Truly baffling indeed.
Okay, but we haven’t ruled out the possibility that the children are being trained by aliens.
Well if they could do me a solid and teach me how to use Unity in my sleep that would be fucking ace.
