Inca Stone Masonry
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The debate over Inca stone masonry techniques is heating up, with some commenters dismissing the "pounding stone theory" in favor of more speculative explanations, such as the existence of a lost, advanced civilization. While some, like jstanley, propose that the Inca inherited pre-existing structures from a more advanced people, others, like bdhcuidbebe, blast this idea as pseudoscience, linking it to Graham Hancock's Netflix shows. The discussion gets even more colorful with bregma's tongue-in-cheek mention of "alien contact theory," while others, like abainbridge, find the pounding stone theory plausible after watching a video of skilled masons at work. Ultimately, the original article is revealed to directly address these claims, putting the onus on commenters to actually read it.
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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.
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.
The article linked in this post mentions the possibility of „red clay“ being used for this purpose, as well as being a mortar.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Dr. Judy Wood invented the word “dustification” and says it might’ve happened to steel beams in 2001, in the presence of disturbances in the magnetosphere created around Hurricane Erin [2][3].
So maybe ancient peoples had some spiritual access to directed free-energy at the magnetic equator for dustifying/liquifying these stones at the seams. I like the circular sand paper theory though, you have any links for that?
[1]: https://youtu.be/ktxV4w2yzeg?t=5854 [2]: https://youtu.be/9_2xjEihEOI?t=583 [3]: https://a.co/d/4MaMYAv
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 it.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-angled_stone
What strikes me most is the sheer human effort involved. The Inca didn't have wheels, pulleys, or iron tools - just stone hammers, bronze chisels, and thousands of workers. The precision jointing wasn't magic or lost technology, just patient trial-and-error with scribing tools.
The comparison to modern stone masonry is eye-opening. We have power tools, steel chisels, and cranes, yet most modern stone buildings use mortar because achieving tight joints is still extremely labor intensive.
Makes you appreciate how much value ancient societies placed on permanence vs our modern "good enough for 50 years" approach.
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.
MACHU PICCHU "A stone masons commentary" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njCStq0Hn58
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.
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 am reminded that the Maya language decipherment really moved forward once the written account was taken seriously.