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.
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 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.
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.
We know that the Inca didn't build Sacsayhuaman because they said that they didn't.
Anyone who has ever built anything can tell you that pounding stones don't explain this superb stonework. Not only is it an incredibly laborious process that you would stop after 20% of the effort for 80% of the result, but you can't achieve a fit like that after any amount of time if you don't have a comparably precise method of measuring the fit. Putting the stones next to each other and eyeballing it won't do.
> 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:
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.
> 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.
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 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.
>They also make statues and other larger things, and in many places it is clear that they have carved them with no other tools than stones and their great wit.
Except that if all of the Inca people were as strong as the current strongest man, and as smart as the smartest man in the history we know so far, they could not move such galactic stones with the technology they had.
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.
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.
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.
MACHU PICCHU "A stone masons commentary" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njCStq0Hn58
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.
Just curious. Do you have some photos?
We know that the Inca didn't build Sacsayhuaman because they said that they didn't.
Anyone who has ever built anything can tell you that pounding stones don't explain this superb stonework. Not only is it an incredibly laborious process that you would stop after 20% of the effort for 80% of the result, but you can't achieve a fit like that after any amount of time if you don't have a comparably precise method of measuring the fit. Putting the stones next to each other and eyeballing it won't do.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
Except that if all of the Inca people were as strong as the current strongest man, and as smart as the smartest man in the history we know so far, they could not move such galactic stones with the technology they had.