This is an incredible writeup. I've visited almost all of these sites to inspect the masonry, spent weeks researching, pestered tour guides and museum workers for oral history, and still I learned things in reading this article.
However there is one aspect which I think is incomplete. When you closely inspect the seams of some of the non-layered works like sacsayhuaman, we are talking about 2mm precision along curved, inconsistent lines of two stones. The when you look at the joints up close, they make the joint between flat cinder-blocks look chunky.
The author posits that this was all hand chiseling and eyeballing, or scribe tools. However I believe there would be occasional gaps or inconsistencies, which simply aren't present in any of the pre-colonial precise works.
One thing I discovered in my research of other central American indigenous cultures (inca was a melting pot of culture and technology) was the use of rope or string, sand, and water to finely cut stones and gems. It is pulled like a circular sand paper and I believe this process would have been used, run between both stones being joined at once, in order to achieve the final tolerances through uniformly wearing the proud aspects of the joint on both sides.
I was told that this was, because of the limited tools, very slow work. After seeing the popular twelve-angled stone at Cusco, I can believe they took all the time, and any effort, necessary. Maybe they even assembled and disassembled the stones until they were perfect.
Take two stones of similar roughness and rub them together for many, many hours. Eventually you'll have to flat surfaces that fit almost perfectly together. Beyond that, it's not hard to see how some skilled craftsmen with some knowledge of geometry (and lots of laborers and a royal mandate) could construct what the Inca did.
What they built is incredibly impressive, but you don't need to invoke magic woo to explain it.
It doesn't take many many hours. I saw a TV documentary on it, it can be done in a half hour with stones the size of a box of kleenex. The archaeologist would also add sand in between the two surfaces to speed it up.
How will you do that to stones of granite, quartz or stishovite ?
Several authors and experts of all kind say what you said and what the article states are completely unfeasible.
“ spiritual access to directed free-energy at the magnetic equator for dustifying/liquifying”
What? These words are English yet carry no meaning to me. Ancient people had clever engineers, just like us. Fuck all to do with magnetic spirituality whatever the fuck that is.
Every time there’s a thread about ancient engineering someone insists on this woo or different woo involving aliens.
Fucking tired of the arrogance and sheer dismissal of ancient people’s achievements.
sorry, I was tempted to draw a connection between the coincidence of dustified steel recorded during a magnetic disturbance and the locations of megalithic sites, but I’m not committed to their connection. I find it fun to hypothesize but I don’t want to dismiss their achievements.
Exceptionaly well documented and written article detailing the well known techniques used to build the iconic stone work in south america.
I read an earlier account of a researcher who started investigating pre spanish south american quaries, and how there sudden realisation, while sitting down for lunch, that the round stone to there right, was the hammer used to shape the larger stone to there left and the rows of peck marks ending in raw stone, all of those centuries before.
Having worked a bit of stone myself, learning to shape, temper stone drills, and test them for utility, it is very easy to understand how basic pragmatism and persistance, in stone, yields large structures that retain that essential message of we are not messing around in this
effort, and your opinions can only embellish
this.
When considering stone articacts of any scale, it is always best to keep in mind that lithic technology pre dates our "species", and our evolutionary track is directly parallel with it, and there is quite litteraly, mountains of evidence for this.And should you so wish, any modest effort to go look, dig, search the ground, known hunting areas or settlement zones, will yield physical evidence that anyone can examine.
our development of technology
I've often come across a concept in magic performance that what the performer is aiming at is for the only available explanation for what you see would take an amount of effort that you immediately discount because clearly nobody would put that much effort into making a ping pong ball disappear. There are two ways to make the ping pong ball disappear: either the performer is cheating somehow, or they did actually do it the obvious way and yes, they did put all that effort in.
This seems the same: the idea the people shaped these stones by hand seems so outrageously profligate with human exertion that you look for how they cheated. But the answer is that it's actually slightly less exertion than you think, multiplied across far more humans than you think, but yes, they did go the long way round.
This is especially timely as I recently listened to the fall of civilizations podcast on the Incas.
A key answer to an ongoing question I didn't know I had is that only the faces of the stones in the walls are joined precisely. The backs have tapers that are filled in.
I recently came across some geopolymer / alkali activated material stuff on YouTube. Fascinating technology - you can in fact print a house or cast "liquid stone" into ceramic. Seems like companies are using it for expanding foam insulation now too.
The "natron hypothesis" seems to make more sense in Egypt where: Natron and granite powder are just laying around, the blocks are all regular rectangular shape, there are murals that seem to describe the process, and they have large high quality artifacts made from diorite which is the hardest thing around.
Of course that doesn't mean it was used everywhere in the ancient world, and this article does a great job discounting it for the Inca.
I'd love to know if there is some detailed microscopy and chemical analysis underway to see if geopolymer use can be proven in Egypt.
We recently visited Peru — Machu Picchu for a week, then Tambopata (the Amazon) for a week. The Amazonians are still proud of the quality of the stone hammers they find and sell to the highlanders; apparently, there's still "old school" stone masons that insist on using "good" Amazonian hammer rocks.
I love how every civilization in history has learned cement and how to use the earth with water to shape it into blocks or form.
Inca stonework was something special. You can tell it’s hand carved and yet smoothed and rounded in a way that softens the look and makes it more appealing. Truly amazing stuff. Mayans had some remarkable temples out of stone but I think because the Inca were up in the mountains, they got better at stone work as a result. I’m not qualified to even assume but that’s just my gut.
What’s the most impressive about the Inca were just how many men they were able to assemble in order for these civil projects to be built.
Pounding stone seems reasonable to me. Obviously I don't have any proof or even strong evidence but I saw a video that changed my perception of what is possible. It showed two old men making a millstone with hand tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lscs5ZgNQrE. The amount of labour involved and quality of the finished item was astonishing to me. Maybe you'll think that the hideous amount of labour needed to make a simple geometric shape makes you even more convinced the Inca has some other way to achieve their even harder task. But it is a fun video anyway.
The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit.
What the masons in the video do is certainly impressive. Cutting organic shapes that fit perfectly together, as if they once were elastic, is another level.
Perhaps the did something similar to what dentists do when building on teeth so that the added material is not the only contract point when jaws are closed. That is, a contact sheet that leaves contact marks.
> Perhaps the did something similar to what dentists do when building on teeth so that the added material is not the only contract point when jaws are closed. That is, a contact sheet that leaves contact marks.
The article linked in this post mentions the possibility of „red clay“ being used for this purpose, as well as being a mortar.
> The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit.
I know. I mainly just wanted to link that video because it is awesome.
The article does explain how the Inca did it - only the front edges are tight fitting. The gaps between the inside surfaces are filled with mortar. They sat the stone where it was to be placed, but with the front edge raised up by resting on some spacers, then just incrementally improved the fit of the edge and re-tried the fit. I'd have still thought that was impossible without seeing something like the video I linked - my intuition of what can be achieved with hammer and chisel was wrong.
Edit: I think that was too strong. I don't have any real knowledge of this subject. The explanation in the article seemed reasonable to me. That is all.
> We know that the Inca didn't build Sacsayhuaman because they said that they didn't.
Where are you getting this from? The Spanish chroniclers report Inca tradition that the 15th century leader Pachacuti initiated the building. The wiki article has a few long excerpts from Pedro Cieza de Leon's Cronicas del Peru, including details of how many labourers were involved and some of the methods for quarrying, transporting stone, and construction:
It’s History Channel doing anything but teaching History. Sad. Only misinformation and conspiracy documentaries are all people want to make but when a real documentary comes along, it blows them all away (shoutout to Ken Burns).
This doesn't pass the sniff test. How could a civilization supposedly far more advanced than the Inca vanish without leaving the Inca a single shred of evidence of their existence? No tools, no records, no memory at all? Oh, except the giant intricate stone structures they built. A coordinated conspiracy to claim their superior civilizational achievements as their own might be the only explanation of that and that's veering into comedy.
Well, there's obviously the alien contact theory. If you've ever been to Nazca where the landing strips are only a few hundred miles from the Inca empire you'd be a believer. If you want to believe, that is.
You know, if you'd actually read the article you're commenting on, you'd know that both of these things are discussed extensively. But easier to just spew nonsense in the comments I guess.
The older construction is also very easy to distinguish from the Inca construction. And the Inca themselves know this history in their community.
Brien Foerster has a lot about the Inca culture.
https://www.youtube.com/@brienfoerster/search?query=inca
The older construction is made of very big stones of hard granite, that fit perfectly together. Assuming they had some concrete, it is easy how they were able to make them fit so perfectly. If you have a source of materials, concrete is not difficult to make. See https://www.geopolymer.org/
People were not stupid, and technologies were invented and forgotten. And just like Roman technologies were lost in the middle ages, this building technology was lost to the Incas.
The Incas build their houses and temples on top of the existing ones. They used smaller stones that did not fit well together. Still a great culture, but with different technologies.
South America has a lot of cultures that disappeared. They had no written history and a lot of stuff was destroyed by later cultures (including the Spanish). So it is impossible for historians to get it right.
For example there were also people with elongated skulls and red hair in Peru. Could be a result of inbreeding as they also had some other physiological differences. Maybe exterminated by another tribe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dfpLN3FbQs
History is often full with conflicts, but presented as if it is all known. There are often conflicts with engineers who point out different technologies used for buildings and such. These technologies do not fit in the simplified timeline of mainstream history.
This is an incredible writeup. I've visited almost all of these sites to inspect the masonry, spent weeks researching, pestered tour guides and museum workers for oral history, and still I learned things in reading this article.
However there is one aspect which I think is incomplete. When you closely inspect the seams of some of the non-layered works like sacsayhuaman, we are talking about 2mm precision along curved, inconsistent lines of two stones. The when you look at the joints up close, they make the joint between flat cinder-blocks look chunky.
The author posits that this was all hand chiseling and eyeballing, or scribe tools. However I believe there would be occasional gaps or inconsistencies, which simply aren't present in any of the pre-colonial precise works.
One thing I discovered in my research of other central American indigenous cultures (inca was a melting pot of culture and technology) was the use of rope or string, sand, and water to finely cut stones and gems. It is pulled like a circular sand paper and I believe this process would have been used, run between both stones being joined at once, in order to achieve the final tolerances through uniformly wearing the proud aspects of the joint on both sides.
> the use of rope or string, sand, and water to finely cut stones and gems
I haven't heard this one before, that's a great idea. Here's a YouTube video of somebody doing this with jade if anybody is curious:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w_9MCNgY2Ww
This is neat but I could have done without the poor diction, AI voice, and inaccessible subtitles.
I was told that this was, because of the limited tools, very slow work. After seeing the popular twelve-angled stone at Cusco, I can believe they took all the time, and any effort, necessary. Maybe they even assembled and disassembled the stones until they were perfect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-angled_stone
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Take two stones of similar roughness and rub them together for many, many hours. Eventually you'll have to flat surfaces that fit almost perfectly together. Beyond that, it's not hard to see how some skilled craftsmen with some knowledge of geometry (and lots of laborers and a royal mandate) could construct what the Inca did.
What they built is incredibly impressive, but you don't need to invoke magic woo to explain it.
It doesn't take many many hours. I saw a TV documentary on it, it can be done in a half hour with stones the size of a box of kleenex. The archaeologist would also add sand in between the two surfaces to speed it up.
How will you do that to stones of granite, quartz or stishovite ? Several authors and experts of all kind say what you said and what the article states are completely unfeasible.
“ spiritual access to directed free-energy at the magnetic equator for dustifying/liquifying”
What? These words are English yet carry no meaning to me. Ancient people had clever engineers, just like us. Fuck all to do with magnetic spirituality whatever the fuck that is.
Every time there’s a thread about ancient engineering someone insists on this woo or different woo involving aliens.
Fucking tired of the arrogance and sheer dismissal of ancient people’s achievements.
Free energy at the magnetic equator. Fucks sake.
sorry, I was tempted to draw a connection between the coincidence of dustified steel recorded during a magnetic disturbance and the locations of megalithic sites, but I’m not committed to their connection. I find it fun to hypothesize but I don’t want to dismiss their achievements.
don't feed the trolls
Exceptionaly well documented and written article detailing the well known techniques used to build the iconic stone work in south america. I read an earlier account of a researcher who started investigating pre spanish south american quaries, and how there sudden realisation, while sitting down for lunch, that the round stone to there right, was the hammer used to shape the larger stone to there left and the rows of peck marks ending in raw stone, all of those centuries before. Having worked a bit of stone myself, learning to shape, temper stone drills, and test them for utility, it is very easy to understand how basic pragmatism and persistance, in stone, yields large structures that retain that essential message of we are not messing around in this effort, and your opinions can only embellish this. When considering stone articacts of any scale, it is always best to keep in mind that lithic technology pre dates our "species", and our evolutionary track is directly parallel with it, and there is quite litteraly, mountains of evidence for this.And should you so wish, any modest effort to go look, dig, search the ground, known hunting areas or settlement zones, will yield physical evidence that anyone can examine. our development of technology
I've often come across a concept in magic performance that what the performer is aiming at is for the only available explanation for what you see would take an amount of effort that you immediately discount because clearly nobody would put that much effort into making a ping pong ball disappear. There are two ways to make the ping pong ball disappear: either the performer is cheating somehow, or they did actually do it the obvious way and yes, they did put all that effort in.
This seems the same: the idea the people shaped these stones by hand seems so outrageously profligate with human exertion that you look for how they cheated. But the answer is that it's actually slightly less exertion than you think, multiplied across far more humans than you think, but yes, they did go the long way round.
Penn & Teller formulation: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-h...
> Having worked a bit of stone myself,
Just curious. Do you have some photos?
This is especially timely as I recently listened to the fall of civilizations podcast on the Incas.
A key answer to an ongoing question I didn't know I had is that only the faces of the stones in the walls are joined precisely. The backs have tapers that are filled in.
I recently came across some geopolymer / alkali activated material stuff on YouTube. Fascinating technology - you can in fact print a house or cast "liquid stone" into ceramic. Seems like companies are using it for expanding foam insulation now too.
The "natron hypothesis" seems to make more sense in Egypt where: Natron and granite powder are just laying around, the blocks are all regular rectangular shape, there are murals that seem to describe the process, and they have large high quality artifacts made from diorite which is the hardest thing around.
Of course that doesn't mean it was used everywhere in the ancient world, and this article does a great job discounting it for the Inca.
I'd love to know if there is some detailed microscopy and chemical analysis underway to see if geopolymer use can be proven in Egypt.
Mike Haduck has a short series (and a bunch of others too)
MACHU PICCHU "A stone masons commentary" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njCStq0Hn58
A great article that starts by not discounting the written accounts that are available.
I am reminded that the Maya language decipherment really moved forward once the written account by Diego De Landa was taken seriously.
We recently visited Peru — Machu Picchu for a week, then Tambopata (the Amazon) for a week. The Amazonians are still proud of the quality of the stone hammers they find and sell to the highlanders; apparently, there's still "old school" stone masons that insist on using "good" Amazonian hammer rocks.
Thanks for sharing the marvellous article, is all I can say.
Not gonna lie. I was really hoping for advanced alien technology as the foundation for Inca building techniques.
This was a fascinating read; thank you!
I love how every civilization in history has learned cement and how to use the earth with water to shape it into blocks or form.
Inca stonework was something special. You can tell it’s hand carved and yet smoothed and rounded in a way that softens the look and makes it more appealing. Truly amazing stuff. Mayans had some remarkable temples out of stone but I think because the Inca were up in the mountains, they got better at stone work as a result. I’m not qualified to even assume but that’s just my gut.
What’s the most impressive about the Inca were just how many men they were able to assemble in order for these civil projects to be built.
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Pounding stone seems reasonable to me. Obviously I don't have any proof or even strong evidence but I saw a video that changed my perception of what is possible. It showed two old men making a millstone with hand tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lscs5ZgNQrE. The amount of labour involved and quality of the finished item was astonishing to me. Maybe you'll think that the hideous amount of labour needed to make a simple geometric shape makes you even more convinced the Inca has some other way to achieve their even harder task. But it is a fun video anyway.
Similarly astonishing to me is that Michelanglo's David was carved from a single piece of marble with a hammer and chisel. I mean, just look at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo)
The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit.
What the masons in the video do is certainly impressive. Cutting organic shapes that fit perfectly together, as if they once were elastic, is another level.
Perhaps the did something similar to what dentists do when building on teeth so that the added material is not the only contract point when jaws are closed. That is, a contact sheet that leaves contact marks.
> Perhaps the did something similar to what dentists do when building on teeth so that the added material is not the only contract point when jaws are closed. That is, a contact sheet that leaves contact marks.
The article linked in this post mentions the possibility of „red clay“ being used for this purpose, as well as being a mortar.
> The video does not counter the parents argument about measuring fit.
I know. I mainly just wanted to link that video because it is awesome.
The article does explain how the Inca did it - only the front edges are tight fitting. The gaps between the inside surfaces are filled with mortar. They sat the stone where it was to be placed, but with the front edge raised up by resting on some spacers, then just incrementally improved the fit of the edge and re-tried the fit. I'd have still thought that was impossible without seeing something like the video I linked - my intuition of what can be achieved with hammer and chisel was wrong.
Edit: I think that was too strong. I don't have any real knowledge of this subject. The explanation in the article seemed reasonable to me. That is all.
> We know that the Inca didn't build Sacsayhuaman because they said that they didn't.
Where are you getting this from? The Spanish chroniclers report Inca tradition that the 15th century leader Pachacuti initiated the building. The wiki article has a few long excerpts from Pedro Cieza de Leon's Cronicas del Peru, including details of how many labourers were involved and some of the methods for quarrying, transporting stone, and construction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n
> Where are you getting this from?
I asked a friend who is knowledgeable about this stuff, but he hasn't provided a source, perhaps he is (and by implication I am) mistaken.
You can’t reason with ancient astronaut conspiracy. They have a loophole answer for everything.
How about you actually read the article, which directly addresses these claims?
you can replicate a dressed stone edge with ordinary clay, then dress another stone to match the sample, cmon man
Is there a counter-theory?
The theory is that there was an older and more advanced civilisation that built them using more advanced techniques which are now lost.
And the Inca inherited pre-existing structures.
The Inca did do stonework of their own, but not close to the standard exhibited in this article.
Thats not a theory. Its the plot of a netflix entertainment show by famous sharlatan journalist (not a scientist, not an archeolog) Graham Hancock.
Anything goes, these days…
It’s History Channel doing anything but teaching History. Sad. Only misinformation and conspiracy documentaries are all people want to make but when a real documentary comes along, it blows them all away (shoutout to Ken Burns).
This doesn't pass the sniff test. How could a civilization supposedly far more advanced than the Inca vanish without leaving the Inca a single shred of evidence of their existence? No tools, no records, no memory at all? Oh, except the giant intricate stone structures they built. A coordinated conspiracy to claim their superior civilizational achievements as their own might be the only explanation of that and that's veering into comedy.
Well, there's obviously the alien contact theory. If you've ever been to Nazca where the landing strips are only a few hundred miles from the Inca empire you'd be a believer. If you want to believe, that is.
You know, if you'd actually read the article you're commenting on, you'd know that both of these things are discussed extensively. But easier to just spew nonsense in the comments I guess.
This is just baseless brainrot conspiracy claims.
The older construction is also very easy to distinguish from the Inca construction. And the Inca themselves know this history in their community. Brien Foerster has a lot about the Inca culture. https://www.youtube.com/@brienfoerster/search?query=inca
The older construction is made of very big stones of hard granite, that fit perfectly together. Assuming they had some concrete, it is easy how they were able to make them fit so perfectly. If you have a source of materials, concrete is not difficult to make. See https://www.geopolymer.org/
People were not stupid, and technologies were invented and forgotten. And just like Roman technologies were lost in the middle ages, this building technology was lost to the Incas.
The Incas build their houses and temples on top of the existing ones. They used smaller stones that did not fit well together. Still a great culture, but with different technologies.
South America has a lot of cultures that disappeared. They had no written history and a lot of stuff was destroyed by later cultures (including the Spanish). So it is impossible for historians to get it right.
For example there were also people with elongated skulls and red hair in Peru. Could be a result of inbreeding as they also had some other physiological differences. Maybe exterminated by another tribe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dfpLN3FbQs
History is often full with conflicts, but presented as if it is all known. There are often conflicts with engineers who point out different technologies used for buildings and such. These technologies do not fit in the simplified timeline of mainstream history.
This difference in technology is obvious regarding the extremely accurate Egyptian granite vases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BlmFKSGBzI and granite boxes.
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