Mystery in Bolivia

[ManTimeForgot]

Puma Punku. Built out of granite (diorite) with a predominant mohs scale hardness of 7 (possibly higher? can't seem to find a definitive answer online). Carbon steel has a mohs scale hardness of 6 (higher than the 3 or 4 that copper and bronze tools would have had at the time).

The natives at the time did not have a writing system. The nearest trees are hundreds of miles away. And it sits atop a hill (carrying 400 ton stones uphill!). Equidistant drilling and laser equivalent leveling.


I'd be a liar if I didn't say I was very curious how this all could be accomplished in the year 500... Even if there was a mundane explanation for this (which I'm all ears for); just what precisely induces people to do something like this? I mean if someone told me that in order to please the gods I had to haul a stone the size of my house hundreds of miles I'd have told them where they can shove that stone!

MTF

 

[Precision Grace]

Time travel and stone lego.

 

[Cudaer]

Sorry to act like an egghead Which I'm not!!

Flint is quite hard. It measures 7 on a hardness scale, compared to 10 for diamonds. The edges of flint flakes are quite sharp. This could be an answer

 

[ManTimeForgot]

I've heard arguments to the effect that flint and obsidian could have been used, but the problem is that flint flakes off (making for a smooth cut to be virtually impossible) and obsidian would almost certainly shatter (leaving evidence in the rock itself).

Of course this doesn't explain how form-fitting hardness seven rocks were precision cut at 400+ tons with no trees anywhere nearby and stacked on top of each other... Or why someone would even do that?!

MTF

 

[ktabic]

The reference to Mohs scale of hardness is a bit of a red-herring. It only addresses the scratch resistance of a material. It does not mean that a harder (on Mohs) material cannot be broken by a softer (on Mohs) material.

Diamond is the hardest easily advailble material, with a Mohs value of 10 (there are a few materials above that, the hardest currently is aggregated diamond nanorods with a Mohs of 12). But men have been shaping diamond for cenuries, with equipment that is 7 or less on Mohs. They wheren't interested in scratching the diamond.

On the same principal - it might be highly resistant to scratches, but it can also be worn away by abrasion.

As for the weight part, Puma Punka may sit atop a hill, but when it was built it was by a lake shore. This may or may not have helped them (the quarry was apprently 10km way over the lake). Also, the place may be treeless now, but 1500 years ago it could have been a forest - treelessness was normally the result of humans. It's still incrediably impressive, but the lack of (mundane) answers normally means people haven't managed to make a proper study of the area.

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Not saying you can't shape materials of greater hardness with lesser hardness. What I am saying is that making straight edge seams/cuts which rival modern laser cuts with something softer than what you are working on defies most conventional explanations. And if abrasion was the method used, then we are talking about large scale planning and hundreds of years... Would a culture completely lacking the written word (something which all the experts agree on) be able to pull that off? Can this be done
without mathematics (need a writing system to pull off math)?

And as far as I am aware the Oriente in Bolivia has always been a grassland...


I'm not going to espouse an extraordinary theory unless I need one. In point of fact I'm posting this as a question mostly because I would like to hear alternative explanations than the ones that Alien Astronaut theorists espouse.

MTF

 

[Happy Joe]

All it needs is a ruler with a vision and resources. Cutting stone is not difficult (people have been doing it for thousands of years). The only thing that is at all amazing is that some people seem to equate the lack of machine tools with an inability to do things with precision. " 'Tis a poor workman that blames his tools."

Abrasives (sand) can be used to smooth and cut. A line of holes can be drilled pretty efficiently with a bow drill and will effectively guide a string and abrasive slurry. (Tooth polish and dental floss is not allowed in some jails because they can cut, relatively easily, the hardened steel bars used to confine detainees).

With no examples of the materials I would postulate a process something like this;
Drill deep holes in line into the rock then use wedges and feathers (a kind of rock splitting tool) to split off a slab (very traditional historical method of cutting rock)
Hammer to rough shape using the pecking method of the Native Americans (beat the high spots with rocks until they turn to dust).
Apply templates as necessary to maintain product form and consistancy,
Use a combination of drilling beating and abrasion to finish.
Polish to a high luster.

A string will do for a straight edge (at least until one is fabricated from stone) and faces can be lapped very flat to one another relatively easily using abrasives and water.

The only tools necessary are rocks, cordage, a stave for each bow drill, water and sand.
(The ancient Egyptians produced amazing works with similar tools).

Yes, it will be labor intensive but who would skimp on labor for our holy ruler/god/high mucky muck?

Enjoy!

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Dude... 400 ton diorite slabs that are all form fitting, as in they are all interlocking with a tolerance measured to less than millimeter in most areas. I admit I don't know enough about masonry to be able to say that's impossible, but I know for a fact that 400 cars can't be lifted by any crane or forklift I'm aware of, so what can?


And sand and water can shape hard stone eventually... But a project of this magnitude (search for Puma Punku and see the scale of this) would take hundreds of years to accomplish with human power, assuming it was even possible for humans to do unaided.

I'm not sure what beasts of burden they had (if any I haven't done the research there), but what they also lack are trees. So a small number of wood and an abundance of stone and copper tools, but large scale projects I had thought would require wood... Am I wrong?

MTF

 

[Drachir]

I was interested enough in this posting to Google it and found that there is a bit of variation in the information about the site. Some claim that the largest stone is over 400 tons, but others place the stone at only 130 tons. 130 tons, of course, is still a considerable weight for primitive people to move, but similar stones in places like Japan were moved with technology that was not much more advanced. The huge 130 ton Octopus Stone at Osaka Castle is an example of a very large stone that was moved a considerable distance before being placed in the castle walls. There are also a number of giant stones in Egypt which were apparently moved about by the ancient Egyptians which equal or surpass in size those at Pumapunku.

Does anyone have any definitive information on the actual size of stones at Pumapunku?

 

[ktabic]

And sand and water can shape hard stone eventually... But a project of this magnitude (search for Puma Punku and see the scale of this) would take hundreds of years to accomplish with human power, assuming it was even possible for humans to do unaided.

To give you an idea of what ancient civilisations where capable of:
The Great Pyramid in Eygpt, build around 2560BC, and was the tallest structure in the world for 3800 years.
It consists of 2.3 million blocks of stone - all quarried and shipped.
It only took around 20 years to build - so they had to move 800 tonnes every day.

Stonehenge, built of a period of 1600 years, had to move blocks of stone some 320km. 40 tonne blocks.

I must admit that Puma Punka interested me enough to do some research, and now I'm becoming suspicious.
Very little archaeological research by properly equipped teams has been done. This isn't surprising - there are many interesting sites and not enough archaeologists and funds.
But what has been done makes no mention of a 440 tonne block of stone (they do mention 100 tonne ones).

Of those websites that do mention 440 tonne block of stone, many seem to state the same thing - as in, it's a copy'n'paste that whole paragraph then slightly rearrange the words. And that makes me distinctly suspicious of their claims.

 

[Dave]

I agree that Granite does not shear or fracture easily, but I believe that it could be cut and sanded as described by Happy Joe, and to such a precision - it would only require work stretching over more than several lifetimes, a slave workforce, and the kind of dedication we find unbelievable.

As for moving such heavy rocks - have you ever heard of Robert E. Peary and the Cape Hall meteorite? It took him and his Inuit helpers three years to get one of the pieces aboard a ship in Greenland; they did build a railway, and they did have some timber, but even so, that was just the easy part. Getting it off the ship in New York was the hard part. It was so heavy (30.9 tonnes) that none of the harbour cranes could handle it, and a shipyard crane actually buckled in the attempt.

Still, that is still only a 1/10th of the size of some of these, if we believe it. Is there any chance that the stones were already at the top of the hill and simply cut and rearranged in situ?

 

[Happy Joe]

As a part of my hobby of looking at the technical achievements of the past; available information on Puma Punku was examined several years ago. At that time, while the large stone pieces were interesting, what was most intriguing was the apparent modular construction (although little seems to remain of the walls/modular pieces, and what is there seems to have fallen over).

Closeups of the rows of holes connected by the cut lines showed little better precision in alignment that most (not particularly careful) people would do with a modern drill. A single mm +/- tolerance is slightly better than commercial tolerance in most hand tool based rough carpentry (not even close to precision work).

The manipulation of large stones seems to have been done so often in early times that it must have been almost commonplace. For a 400 ton block though; a reasonable explanation would be to shape it in situ.

For those who are interested a person (in the state of Wisconsin, I believe) has found a way to move large stones without power tools and this seems to be a strong contender as a possible rediscovery of primitive methods;

Pyramids, Stonehenge, Easter Island and the Great Pyramid explained by Wallace Wallington!

Enjoy!

 

[Ursa major]

The Wiki entry on diorite (Diorite - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) includes this text:

Diorite is an extremely hard rock, making it difficult to carve and work with. It is so hard that ancient civilizations (such as Ancient Egypt) used diorite balls to work granite. Its hardness, however, also allows it to be worked finely and take a high polish, and to provide a durable finished work.

Now while I do realise that the original post was talking about accuracy in terms of large interlocking blocks, there was an implication that because a rock is hard, it's difficult to get other than a rough surface out of it. The above quote suggests quite the opposite.

 

[Nik]

I was very impressed by the stone-shifting linky: It reminded me of how us kiddies 'walked' planters and bins around the garden...

IIRC, repair work on Inca stonework found that only the visible edges were worked to their famous close tolerance.

Also, I doubt that diorite balls began round. They became that way as use wore edges down...

As for close tolerance, remember mirrors and lenses used to be hand-ground, 'figured' to optical precision with rouge and a bitumen pad. The two major advances in 'figuring' were polishing machinery then, recently, spin-casting of mirror-blanks...

 

[ManTimeForgot]

If you look at a link to an article on Tihuanaco (sp?) on the site happy joe layed down you get this...


"One of the construction blocks from which the pier was fashioned weighs an estimated 440 tons (equal to nearly 600 full-size cars) and several other blocks laying about are between 100 and 150 tons. The quarry for these giant blocks was on the western shore of Titicaca, some ten miles away. There is no known technology in all the ancient world that could have transported stones of such massive weight and size. The Andean people of 500 AD, with their simple reed boats, could certainly not have moved them. Even today, with all the modern advances in engineering and mathematics, we could not fashion such a structure."



Now I'm preeetty sure that the last statement is just exaggeration, but being able to do it with an illiterate peoples in reed boats (not modern supertankers with cranes) is mind-boggling.

I mean maybe it could be done if you gave them 1,000 years to do it in, but holy crap how do you convince a populace to spend 1,000 years to do something?! (Ursa I am aware that harder substances take on shapes more readily; its the reason why cotton balls don't have better edges than diamonds. But the point is that hard substances don't take on those edges easily; sanding/water abrasion takes time... serious time if the size of some of these things are to be believed)

MTF

 

[Ursa major]

Two things about ancient peoples (okay 1500 years is not that long ago, but anyway...):

• They were as intelligent as us, in that they were able to solve problems. (If all we did was to read books to find solutions, we wouldn't be finding out how to do new stuff, would we?) So unless the largest block was already at the site (i.e. moved there by some geological process), it was moved by humans and one of them worked out how to do it. (We're humans: that's what we do.)

• They were as stupid as us, so they were prepared to spend a lot of time and effort doing seemingly daft things, such as moving and smoothing enormous blocks of stone; or sending twelve people on a 400000 km jaunt to somewhere where there's no water to drink and no air to breathe**.

** - Yes, and I think that this was important; but we are allowed to try to achieve our collective dreams - we're humans: that's what we do - even if the funding may have only been the by-product of rivalry and pride.

 

[Happy Joe]

maybe it could be done if you gave them 1,000 years to do it in,

Since it exists (baring exaggeration or misinformation) it must have been done and almost certainly did not take 1000 years.

Just because you do not know how to make a chronometer does not make them a gift from a higher power or aliens.

I do agree that many of the large artefact's from ancient times are mind boggling to some extent.
One of the best parts is that the farther you go back into history the larger the largest artifacts/blocks become (to an extent).

A lot of people who make statements like "Even today, with all the modern advances in engineering and mathematics, we could not fashion such a structure." simply do not understand that we can replicate anything that I have seen reference to from the ancient world, today, if sufficient money and time were to be made available for the task. No, it may not be easy but it would not be impossible.

There is a huge difference in not knowing exactly how the ancients did or made things and not being able to replicate objects that have obviously been fabricated or tasks that have been done.
As a retired engineer I simply do not believe people who use dirty language like "impossible" or "can't" I do believe people who say things like "too expensive" or "don't want to" but only after checking their figures and looking for alternatives.

Here is a link to moving a 4,400 ton structure; the Cape Hatteras light house;
Cape Hatteras National Seashore - Moving the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse (U.S. National Park Service)

Enjoy!

 

[ManTimeForgot]

Joe:

I don't believe aliens did it. Aliens (Yes, they exist. No, I won't debate this with you. Air exists. Aliens exist. Deal with it) capable of interstellar travel don't go around telling ants how to build a better anthill; its just not part of their program otherwise we would be awash in skyscraper ruins that the ancient Greeks built.


But what I do believe is that I have no fracking clue how humans could have built Puma Punku and if you can please shed some light on it without implying I'm some kind of weirdo it would be much appreciated.


From the link you listed: "To accomplish this feat, the original foundation down to the pine timbers was replaced by temporary shoring beams and supports. Then a steel beam mat was inserted over the timber mat with temporary posts on top. As cross beams and main beams were set, the temporary shoring parts and beams were removed. Hydraulic jacks built into the main beams were used to effect the 6 foot raise so that roll beams and rollers could be introduced. After all jacks were shored, using oak cribbing, the system was pressurized and the jacks began lifting. At each lift level, jacks were retracted and shored up in sequence and the system lifted again to 6 feet. At this point it was ready to roll."

I can see how this works. While my knowledge of engineering is insufficient to do the math I know enough of physics and metallurgy to know that the tensile strengths, flexibility, and densities are more or less compatible.

My problem lies here: All this required planning. Planning as I understand it requires math and writing. The people who built Puma Punku did not have a written language (this is something that every expert on the native indians of the area agrees upon). The area it was built upon sits atop a plain which would require hundreds of km treks in order to acquire wood to build support struts, rollers, lifts, levers, etc. How would this be done without wood?

A lesser problem I have is one of ability: How do you perform precision drilling on something which is hardest substance you have? I get abrasion for cuts (it takes hundreds of years for something of this size, but it is possible), but how would you drill? Equal hardness drill bits? I can see volcanic glass and abrasion shaped diorite drill heads doing the trick (again over a stupid amount of time), but is this really all there is?

MTF

 

[Dave]

MTF - Joe isn't saying he knows how, only that it happened, so therefore it must be possible. So, on that point I think we are all agreed. I don't think aliens helped them either.

And I agree entirely with Ursa Major about the going to the Moon analogy. This was an achievement that showed to everyone around that these were people who could do such amazing technological things you had better leave them well alone. So, I think prestige is the only reason needed for the "why?" part.

I don't see your point about the written language as the major problem you do. These people had a civilisation, so communication goes without saying. They must have been able to express, communicate and record ideas in some way - pictograms, chants, songs, hand-symbols?? For arithmetic, they could have counted with an abacus of coloured stones without any need to use symbols.

Your other point about the lack of Timber is something I do see as a problem. Unless the block was already at the top of the hill - due to weathering of surrounding softer sandstone - this does sound like a volcanic granite plug - then I assume that some kinds of Pulleys or Levers would be needed. What kinds of local materials could be substituted for Timber? And you would need rope - strong rope which I'm not sure they would be capable of.

On the other hand, who says there was no timber? Are we not assuming that the climate there then, was the same as it is now? That is a very big assumption and likely to be wrong.

The third point about precision drilling was already answered earlier by Joe. Only the faces of the stone blocks are smoothed, and the tolerance of the blocks is not as close as it appears to be at first glance, just good enough.

 

[Nik]

Perhaps the necessary timbers were brought many, many miles ?? Perhaps they came with the big stones ??

Although Easter Island is only a small example, the islanders shifted their blocks with the crater slopes' small trees plus ropes plaited from the crater marsh's reeds...

Um, to clarify an earlier comment about hardnesses of granite and copper drills: IIRC, copper may be work hardened. But, a better way is to use soft copper tools with wet grit-- The hardest constituents of the grit becomes embedded in the copper, allowing a precise cut...