Delta Block: More On Ancient Stone Technology

lolik4 on Tuesday, October 12 @ 18:20:14 PDT

Everybody who has traveled to Egypt, Mesopotamia, South America and many more places has seen it: the astonishing
craftsmanship of these ancient stoneworkers. The precision fit of large stoneblocks is eminent in both the Old and New World.
It is hardly imaginable, that all of this should have been done by pure manual work alone. The same applies to the smaller,
but shurely not less perfect artefacts, like stone bowls, vases etc. The Mesoamerican cultures had a special affinity with
obsidian, a very brittle volcanic glass. They used it for a variety of (mostly ritual) objects. An Aztec craftsman made these
earplugs, which put our belief in manual work to a tough test... (read more to see photos)

They are polished to a thickness of less then a millimeter and completely symmetrical. The perfect geometrical shape and the somewhat small difference between the tube's
diameter and the diameter of the flanges make them rather unusual. They're supposedly made with tools like bamboo drills, stone chisels and sand as an abrasive. I wonder, how
often the poor man had to start over...

Some years ago, a group of enthusiastic researchers (lead by Roger Hopkins, a stonework professional who has done several of these experiments) carried out a small scale
experiment in Egypt, regarding the building of a pyramid with a base of a few meters across, which is in itself a respectable project.

But then they stated, rather boldly in my opinion, this could have been the way, the big ones had been build. Although they were cautious enough to use the word "could",
translating the results of the experiment into a project a hundred times larger, seems careless and overconfident to me.

In Southamerica, the same mistake was made. In an attempt, to explain the astounishing fit of the Inca stone walls, like this one in the city of Cuzco, incorporating the famous
"stone with 12 angles",

the reaserchers experimented with a technique to copy the shape of the top stone to the one beneath it. This involved some quite dangerous methods to hold the top stone in an
elevated position, in midair, so to speak, which did well with stones of 30 cm across. What they couldn't provide, was an idea, how to bring it into practice with these stones, some
of them more than 3 meters tall:
Sacsayhuaman is believed to have been a fortress. The interesting thing with these walls is that the builders took every measure to make the stones fit to an almost ridiculous
degree of perfection in the most difficult shapes, while the front is rough and covered with deformations that make them look unfinished. That can bring up the idea, that these
walls have been build in a much different way.

Professor Davidovits from the Geopolymer Institute in France has found a possible answer to these riddles. He asks if the Egyptian Pyramids at Gizeh have been build with a
construction technique widely used in our time: Are Pyramids made out of concrete?

It seems ridiculous at first glance, but it solves a few nasty problems that couldn't be solved yet with the established theories. For instance: how did the pyramidbuilders in Egypt
manage to haul the stones up to the summit, where the workspace is reduced to virtually nothing? All those man had to stand somewhere.

In short, his theory is that the 2 million blocks of limestone that make up the core of the pyramid of Chufu (Cheops), have not been cut into shape, but the limestone was solved
in water, brought to the building place in small portions and then the blocks were cast in situ.

Even more interesting are his ideas on the precision-fit Inca walls: He puts forward a technique to soften the stone by use of acid plant extracts! Before you start laughing, take a
closer look:
detail from one of the walls of the Sacsayhuaman complex. Many stones show strange impressions or scrape marks, as if the surface has been soft during tooling. (Take also a
closer look to the picture above). Just take a square piece of wood and push it in soft clay. You will make impressions just like these!

The great wall at Ollantaytambo, Peru. Observe the third large stone from the left with its long scrape marks and the large flat impression at the top edge of the second stone
from the right
Ollantaytambo, Peru Soft stones could also explain the precision fit. The stones would settle by their own weight and the weight of the ones on top, thereby squeezing into any
gaps.

The protrusions could be formed by making marks in the support structure that would be necessary to prevent uncontrolled movement of the material at the outer face of the wall.
It is sometimes mentioned, these protrusion were made to hold gold plating or to tie ropes to for handling. Unfortunately, they would work insufficiently for either use and are too
randomly placed. Fact remains: we don't have a clue:

Puma Punku complex at Tiahuanaco, Bolivia. The approx. 1cm wide groove with inside a set of equidistant holes is one of many features there, who are so hard to explain, that
the whole site is virtually hushed up by the archaeological community.
Its just a few hundred meters away from the famous site of Tiahuanaco, but almost never mentioned. If not advanced machining in ancient times is the key to the mystery, then
the cast stone theory could provide some answers. It would not be difficult to build a mold with a strip and pins in it, which had to be removed after hardening of the stone...

I think this theory is a really interesting approach. There is a short description and a PDF-document on the Geopolymer Library page that explains the theory and shows some results of tests conducted on
similar types of stone. While during those tests they obviously only softened the surface to make cutting of the stones easier, I think in some cases the stones had to be soft through and through. At least
two serious problems remain open (regardless what method, if any of these, has been used): The stoneworkers of those times would have used enormous amounts of acid and, since the stone wouldn't be
entirely liquified, they still had to move those giants! Since the visual aspects alone clearly can not solve this matter, it would be necessary to examine the actual stones for any signs of such a treatment.

Now lets get back to the origins of the meso- and southamerican cultures. We all were told, that America was first populated by migrating people from Asia, using the then existing landbridge at the Behring
strait during the last ice age. When that landbridge disappeared, the freshly arrived Americans were "on their own", until the Conquistadores came. But there's a lot of evidence, that the Asians had not
forgotten about America and migrated again, but this happened just a few thousand years ago...

Ancient Egyptian Stone Technology

The purpose in presenting these materials on ancient Egyptian stone technology is to, without
prejudice to any particular possibility, encourage the scientific process in uncovering the truth about
the skills of the ancient builders. Photos, diagrams and essays by Petrie, Dunn and Francis.

Hard Facts - Robert Francis - Photos and commentaries describing tube drilling, sawing and
lathe work visible at Giza and in the Cairo Museum.
 Mechanical Methods - Extracts from W.M. Flinders Petrie's classic reference work which
describe some of his findings at 'Gizeh' - "...the graving out of lines in hard stones by
jewel points, was a well known art." "...the lathe appears to have been as familiar an
instrument in the fourth dynasty, as it is in the modern workshops." "...tube drills about
18 inches diameter" "...The only feasible explanation of this piece is that it was produced
by a circular saw."

Ancient Machining - Chris Dunn - Photos, diagrams &

technical discussion of ancient stone machining
techniques.

Post to Sci.archaeology 03/25/97- Chris Dunn - Response

to Miguel Maguirre articulating a possible resolution to the
Ancient Machining debate.

The builders in ancient Egypt shaped many kinds of stone

with consummate mastery. They were adept with the use of a variety of tools for manufacturing
housewares, building stone and statuary; tube drills, straight saws, circular saws, lathes, and
polishers. The marks left in the stone by these tools are the only available reliable source of
information about these tools and how they were used. To date, no surviving examples of the actual
tools used have been found. Neither have any written or pictorial records come to light which mention
or describe their use.

There is legitimate debate about the nature of the tools and their developmental history. The marks left
in stone have not yet been studied in enough detail, by modern experts in machining techniques, to
answer conclusively some key questions:

 what material were the cutting tips, surfaces or abrasives made of?
 how may they have been manufactured?
 what machinery was used to orient the cutting surface to the stone?
 what pressure was used and how it was applied?
 what standards of exactness were they capable of?

There has been much theorizing and debate but without rigorous studies followed up with the
duplication of equivalent artifacts by the proposed method - no scientific proof exists for any of the
theories.

The answers to these questions are consequential because they bear directly on the chronology and
developmental history of the earliest dynastic and predynastic Egyptian cultures.