[HN Gopher] Inca Stone Masonry
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Inca Stone Masonry
Author : jppope
Score : 136 points
Date : 2025-12-21 07:26 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.earthasweknowit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.earthasweknowit.com)
| srean wrote:
| Thanks for sharing the marvellous article, is all I can say.
| metalman wrote:
| 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
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _Having worked a bit of stone myself,_
|
| Just curious. Do you have some photos?
| regularfry wrote:
| 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.
| gwern wrote:
| Penn & Teller formulation:
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-
| reveals-h...
| interloxia wrote:
| Mike Haduck has a short series (and a bunch of others too)
|
| MACHU PICCHU "A stone masons commentary"
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=njCStq0Hn58
| codeduck wrote:
| This was a fascinating read; thank you!
| reactordev wrote:
| 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.
| djoldman wrote:
| 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.
| elif wrote:
| 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.
| helterskelter wrote:
| > the use of rope or string, sand, and water to finely cut
| stones and gems
|
| 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
| anon84873628 wrote:
| I recently came across some geopolymer / alkali activated
| material stuff on YouTube. Fascinating technology - you can in
| fact print a house or cast "liquid stone" into ceramic. Seems
| like companies are using it for expanding foam insulation now
| too.
|
| 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.
| Isamu wrote:
| A great article that starts by not discounting the written
| accounts that are available.
|
| I am reminded that the Maya language decipherment really moved
| forward once the written account by Diego De Landa was taken
| seriously.
| drob518 wrote:
| Not gonna lie. I was really hoping for advanced alien technology
| as the foundation for Inca building techniques.
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