Mystery in Bolivia

[the smiling weirwood]

He isn't really disproving the proposed theories. Its more like repeating the same idea about granite being extraordinarily difficult to plane and cut with ancient methods, which it was, but not impossible. Also, what kind of available workforce are you assuming to be present when you make claims like it would take a thousand years to accomplish?

 

[ManTimeForgot]

I'm basing my assessment on the population densities that I know incan and mayan cultures setup in their "city-states" (which I studied in anthropology class in college). Basically if you had two such city-states (or one major one) working together you would see somewhere between 2-4,000 workers total (that's not 4,000 people; not everyone is capable of helping out with building; there is a limit to the number of craftsman capable of masonry and not everyone can be given over to the mundane labor of moving things into place or your harvests will fail). The local city/cities would not have been anywhere near the size of Tikal (60,000 to 100,000 people at its peek), since this culture was not anywhere near as prolific or wide-spread. You might see a population total in the area of around 10-20 thousand.

The drilling I now understand from other posts to be workable in a decent time frame. The abrasion for stones of a surface as large as some of those are seems a daunting task, but one that could be undertaken on a large time-scale. The seeming lack of coordinated planning (as evidenced by a lack of written word and thus making application of mathematics difficult) would tend to draw out how long it would take to complete. The precision is not as difficult to undertake as I thought it would be based on what I understand from Happy Joe, so I can rule that out as a major determining factor. But the lack of easily available wood and the location of a quarry 10 miles from the building site and reed boats rendering use of boating for the 400 ton dock stone impossible would tend to make the task nearly insurmountable in what I would consider a "reasonable" amount of time.


I admit I don't know enough about the ideological/religious motivation of the indigineous peoples, but I don't know of any way to motivate people ideologically enough to create a situation where people will work on something for multiple centuries. I have a degree in sociology and the failure of marxist ideology for motivating a continued socialist/communist state is something that is a typical topic in sociology classes. People can and do put up with a lot of abuse from their government, but there is a limit, and I am trying to get a good estimate of how long this would take so I can get a good idea what it would take to have put this thing together.

MTF

 

[the smiling weirwood]

Did you remember from your classes that the Inca and their precursors made use of knotted assemblages of string, called quipu, to track numerical data and possibly other unknown functions? This could be something that was integral to the construction and would have filled certain functions lacking a written language.

I don't think its constructive to say simply, "they couldn't have done it with the resources they had" because obviously they did.

Also, it is estimated the nearby city of Tiwanaku would have had a population up to 30,000 during the time that Puma Punku is thought to have been constructed. If it was indeed a holy site, then it is also extremely probable that people from outside the area were brought in to either help or donate materials. Pilgrimages to places of cosmic pre-eminence was common and important in Incan culture.

 

[HareBrain]

I admit I don't know enough about the ideological/religious motivation of the indigineous peoples, but I don't know of any way to motivate people ideologically enough to create a situation where people will work on something for multiple centuries. I have a degree in sociology and the failure of marxist ideology for motivating a continued socialist/communist state is something that is a typical topic in sociology classes. People can and do put up with a lot of abuse from their government, but there is a limit, and I am trying to get a good estimate of how long this would take so I can get a good idea what it would take to have put this thing together.

MTF

I'd say these giant projects thousands of years ago were built by people who had a very different mindset to ourselves. Not just in terms of a different ideology or religion, but an inability to see themselves as true individuals. They didn't "think for themselves". It's very hard for us, with our fully developed egos, to appreciate what this must have been like. It's also surprising to most people that our current view of ourselves, our practice of examining our individual interior lives, our own motivations etc, hasn't really been around for that long.

 

[Nik]

I hope to order the DVD on mega-stone moving from the earlier linky.

It should make a neat gift for a close relative who's keen on Egyptology, and an ingenious guy in his own right...

 

[Urlik]

I'd say these giant projects thousands of years ago were built by people who had a very different mindset to ourselves. Not just in terms of a different ideology or religion, but an inability to see themselves as true individuals. They didn't "think for themselves". It's very hard for us, with our fully developed egos, to appreciate what this must have been like. It's also surprising to most people that our current view of ourselves, our practice of examining our individual interior lives, our own motivations etc, hasn't really been around for that long.

I think that someone must have a had a huge ego to have even conceived the idea to try and convince the rest of the population to undertake something of that magnitude.

 

[clovis-man]

I think that someone must have a had a huge ego to have even conceived the idea to try and convince the rest of the population to undertake something of that magnitude.

Or maybe it was just part of life, like paying taxes or taking out the trash. One thing has been proven over and over: either the cultures who create such edifices have an abundant food supply which will support specialized labor projects or they have a very long view of the achievements they wish to have. Or both.

 

[HareBrain]

I think that someone must have a had a huge ego to have even conceived the idea to try and convince the rest of the population to undertake something of that magnitude.

Where the culture demanded it, kings in ancient times allowed themselves to be sacrificed to ensure the fertility of the land. Self-aggrandisement through building seems to have begun with the Egyptians, when the rulers began to get a sense of themselves as important individuals rather than disposable parts of a greater whole (and thus started having others sacrificed in their place) - but this change to ego-led consciousness (not necessarily the same as "having a big ego") might have happened later in the Americas.

 

[mosaix]

Okay, okay, I did it. I was bored one day.

Oh no you don't HJ - it was me!

 

[Urlik]

I just watched a documentary on Machu Pichu (built high on a rdge of the Peruvian Andes) and they showed how blocks were shaped purely by hitting them with hammer stones (smooth stones found in river beds)
the way that the faces of stones were matched to each other was remarkable in its simplicity

and for those who say that we are unable to build anything of this magnitude today, take a look at the dams and sea defences built around the Netherlands in the early 20th century