Just curious. Do you have some photos?
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.
MACHU PICCHU "A stone masons commentary" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njCStq0Hn58
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
I am reminded that the Maya language decipherment really moved forward once the written account by Diego De Landa was taken seriously.
srean•1mo ago