Welcome to the World of Antiquity
channel. I’m David Miano, and I am answering voicemails.
Let’s give one a listen. “Hello, David. This is Raphael from France.
What is your take on the tools and processes that were involved to build the huge megalithic
polygonal walls and blocks that we see in South America and around the
world. Thank you very much.” I received another similar voicemail from
someone else. Let’s hear that one too. “Hello, Dr. Miano. Greetings from Poland. I would like to ask about
polygonal walls, polygonal masonry, how they had been doing it, what technique they
used for such precise results. And why around the globe, if they were not interconnected, and
why they stopped to build this way? Thanks.” A lot of people seem to be interested
in this one. For those who don’t know, the term polygonal masonry is used to describe
a masonry pattern that incorporates blocks with more than four sides. When looking at
the façade of a wall, often the stones, or the majority of the stones, are in the
form of irregular pentagons or hexagons. The corners are not cut in right angles except
maybe occasionally or for corner blocks. Polygonal masonry generally incorporates natural stone, the
blocks having arbitrary shapes, and then they are processed in such a way that they become irregular
polygons that are tightly adjacent to each other on the front side of the structure. A feature of
the polygonal masonry is that it doesn’t require mortar, and it possesses sufficient strength and
stability to withstand moderate earthquakes. The stone blocks were not held in place by cramps or
wedges of any kind; the statics and mechanical strength of the walls derived exclusively from the
enormous mass and weight of the stones themselves. In the archaeological record, the polygonal
structure has been documented throughout mainland Greece, with the oldest remains having been found
in Attica, in the Peloponnese and in Acarnania. This technique of building walls used
to be considered to be an intermediate method between that of the cyclopean walls of
Mycenaean times and the squared-ashlar walls, but now it is realized that it
developed at about the same time as the squared-ashlar walls and is
just a constructional variation. In the Greek world, the classical polygonal
method was commonly used in the building of city walls, ramparts, bases, basements, and
the substructure of large-scale terracing. It was particularly popular during the 5th
century BCE, although it continued to be adopted, albeit more sporadically,
during the following centuries. Although it was never the most common
form of masonry in the ancient world, it was common enough that we still
have the remains of many examples. Some polygonal masonry is crude, others refined,
and there are many types. In some places, the stones have straight sides,
and in other areas curved sides. Certain characteristics of polygonal masonry
have led researchers to create divisions, such as “polygonal work with straight edges” or “coursed
polygonal,” and “Lesbian masonry.” No, no, Lesbian masonry because it is centered on the
island of Lesbos. The basic feature of the Lesbian work is that the edges and joints of the
blocks are cut in curvilinear shape. Curvilinear polygonal masonry can be observed at every one
of the polis centres on Lesbos as well as several secondary sites; no other region provides so many
examples in so limited an area. It might be more appropriate to think of Lesbian masonry as its own
independent form, rather than simply a variation of classical polygonal masonry. Then again, the
distinction between Lesbian and other styles of polygonal masonry is one of degree; no polygonal
wall is made up entirely of curvilinear or rectilinear blocks. But very few polygonal walls
on Lesbos have predominantly rectilinear joints. One excellent example of polygonal “Lesbian”
masonry can be seen at the sacred site of Delphi on the mainland: the great temenos,
dating from the 6th century B.C., features a steep boundary wall, constituting a
monumental entrance to this sanctuary. Polygonal “Lesbian” masonry was most popular
during the 6th century BCE, and probably first appeared a century before. By the 4th century
BCE it had almost completely fallen into disuse. Walls were one of the greatest expenses of a Greek
polis. Lesbian masonry, in particular, must have been particularly time-consuming and expensive. It
required a skilled craftsman with a special tool. A bevel, an angle-measuring tool with rigid arms,
is usually sufficient when joining stones with generally straight sides. But curved
joints require the use of a flexible ruler. The significant work involved in
dressing these polygonal stones, and the considerable skill required of
masons, may have been the underlying reason for the gradual move towards
the use of more regular blocks and the laying of continuous courses of masonry, a
task that relatively unskilled laborers could do. Polygonal masonry walls are found in Italy too.
They are built of large limestone blocks without the use of mortar and are found throughout
the mountainous regions of central Italy. Usually, they are not freestanding, but used
as terrace revetment walls applied in a variety of contexts, including fortifications,
road embankments, agricultural terraces, funerary monuments, cisterns, towers, and
as podia for urban and rural buildings. What I’ve shown you so far are ancient examples
of polygonal masonry, but I realize you really want to know about the fortress of Saqsayhuaman,
which is at Cuzco in Peru, the chief city of the Inca Empire in its heyday. The dismantling of
the fortress started in 1537, only five years after the first Spaniards reached Cuzco. Yes,
the Spanish did get to see it in its full glory, though the outer wall was never quite finished.
What we see there now is what is left of the fortress after it was used and abused as a quarry
for many centuries. The reason I haven’t talked about the site already is because it’s not an
ancient site. It was built largely in the 1400’s, which would make it contemporary with
the late medieval period in Europe. That’s out of my time period. Now yes, there
are people who argue that the constructions at Saqsayhuaman are older and date it to prehistoric
times, which is also out of my field of expertise. But I keep getting questions about it, so
I figure it’s time I give you an answer. Historical records credit the design
of the fortress to four architects over a period of years: Huallpa Rimachi,
Maricanchi, Acahuana, and Calla Cunchuy. It was begun in the reign of
the great Inca empire builder Pachacuti, or perhaps his son
Thupa in the mid-15th century CE. See these smaller stones filled
in here between the large ones? You may sometimes see on the internet people
arguing that the Inca could not have built this fortress, and they point to these stones
as evidence. They say these smaller stones constitute Inca repair work and therefore the
larger stones must come from an earlier period. But by simply asking around, doing some reading,
or looking at old photos, a proper researcher would realize that these smaller stones are
modern repair work and not from Inca times. Ancient Architects noted this on his channel. - This stonework we can see here is modern
renovation work, laid hundreds of years after the Inca period, and this was done to tidy up
the site. You can see it all along the walls of Saqsayhuaman. This is shown when you compare
the 1930s image with the modern one side-by-side. You can clearly see where the walls have
been built up recently with inferior stone to stop soil creeping down the hill, to
protect the site and make it safe for tourists. - There are three, staggered sawtooth walls.
It appears as if the third and second walls were built first, and the first wall, which
is built of bigger and rougher stones and designed slightly differently, was built
last. It shows signs of being unfinished. Some of the masonry here is consistent with the
well-known ancient methods of stone processing and so doesn’t require any special explanation,
but I do want to address the larger stone blocks, some of them weighing several
tons. I hear the heaviest, one of the cornerstones, is about 120 tons. The
quality of the curved interfaces is striking, and they fit very close to each
other almost without a gap. The fact that they are almost perfectly fit
together has caused some researchers mistakenly to decide that the stones were formed or cast from a
certain plastic mixture – and different types have been proposed. But why would the designers choose
to produce an expensive plastic mixture when there is a lot of ready-to-use material around – natural
stones of arbitrary shape that would work well for polygonal masonry? And why would they use
a plastic mixture to make such complex forms? That method would have worked
better for making stone blocks of uniform size. I’m not convinced by the
geopolymer arguments. I will leave a link to a video that goes into this issue in more
detail if you’re interested in looking into it. Probably the foremost expert on Inca architecture
and stone construction was Jean-Pierre Protzen, who died earlier this year. It would have been
great to talk to him, though he has left us with numerous books and articles on the subject.
Another person who has done quite a bit of research on the topic is the architect Vincent
Lee. He has written books and articles on the methods used to make the polygonal masonry at
Sacsayhuaman too and appeared on the television program NOVA to talk about his theories. He’s
still around. Guess what? I wanted to give you the best answer possible, so I contacted Vince Lee to
ask him some questions. Here’s our conversation. - I've talked to a lot of people who have
ideas about Saqsayhuaman, and they think, "Oh the Inca - they couldn't have built
it. They didn't have the technology," you know, "It must have come from some ancient
lost civilization," or something like that. Just in general, what do you think
about those sorts of theories? - Well, I would... I don't buy into any of
those extraordinary theories like that. The ancients were just as smart as we are, and in
some respects probably better at what they were doing than we would be trying to do the same
thing today, because they did it all the time, and so I'm sure they had all sorts
of tricks and methods of dealing with big stones and so forth that we've since lost and
haven't thought of, you know, haven't reconsidered yet. So I... that's all nonsense. They were just
as smart as we are, and with focused intelligence, they did everything that we find in
antiquity, as far as I'm concerned. - Yeah, yeah, and I agree with you. Okay,
let's talk about the process. So first of all, the stones - what are they made out
of, and where did they come from? - Well, the work at Saqsayhuaman
specifically is what we're talking about? - That's right. - Yeah, yeah well it's kind of... It's all called
Yukon blue limestone. It's quite a hard limestone, and the hillsides up behind the monument, that
is to say, further north than the monument, are scattered with outcrops of
exactly the same kind of stone, and in fact, quite a bit of it, if you go far
enough north, maybe three or four kilometers north of the site. The chroniclers talk about
all sorts of different sources for the stone, including some that were very far away and very
unlikely, frankly, to have been used certainly for the big monoliths, and it's often unclear
whether they're talking about the big stones in the northern terraces specifically,
or maybe just the stones worked in the monument itself, which included a great
deal of work, you know, up on top of the hill and on the other sides of the hill from
the northern terraces. And it's clear that a lot of that stone came from Rumicolca, which
was the big andesite quarry down the canyon below Cuzco and so forth, and other places as
well, but I think it's very likely that most of the stone in the northern terraces came from the
the hillsides just north of the monument itself. - And how far would that have been away
from where they brought the stones? - Well, the uh... if you go... - Oh, I mean approximately. - Yeah, yeah, if you look on Google Earth,
within about three or four kilometers. You've got outcrops of exactly the same kind of
stone all over the place, and even in a few places there is some evidence that there might
have been quarrying, although the area is now, of course, densely inhabited by farmers
and so forth. So a lot of that early evidence has gone away. Ephraim Squier,
who visited the site in the 1850s, however, before all that more recent development
happened, went up there and looked around, and he said there was evidence of
quarrying everywhere up on that hillside. - Oh, okay. And then, what would
you think was the process for quarrying the stone? Like, how did
they make the blocks in the quarry? - Well, one of the interesting things about
the Incas, as opposed to most other ancient civilizations that built a lot of stuff
with stone, [is] the Incas did hardly any, what we would call, actual quarrying, that is
to say, that the Andes were so scattered with boulders and so forth, talus slides and scree
slides, and you know mountains that were falling apart, eroding and so forth, that they had
an almost unlimited supply of loose material, and almost all of their work was done by simply
picking stones off of mountainsides, or out of the ground, digging them out of the ground and
using them, as opposed to actually chopping them out of bedrock the way the Egyptians,
for example, routinely did in their time. - I see, okay now... - That also, by the way, in my opinion, it gives
you some reason to understand why they preferred polygonal stone work, because in addition to the
fact that they didn't quarry them and therefore weren't in a position to chop rectangular or
rectilinear blocks out of bedrock, not only did they not do that, but the stones that they did
use came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and the only tool they had for... and they were often very
hard stone, you know. Machu Picchu white granite, Ollantaytambo is rhyolite, Saqsayhuaman is this
limestone, Cuzco andesite. Those are all hard stones, and a bronze chisel, which the Incas had,
won't do you any good with those stones. You have to use a hammer stone, much like the Egyptians
did on granite up at the quarries at Aswan. And the hammerstones are found all over the place,
if you know where to look. So it's clear that they were just bashing away the unwanted material,
and clearly the less bashing, the better, and so if you had a funny place in the wall to fill,
the thing to do is to look around until you find a stone about that size and shape and bash
away the material necessary to fit it into place. - I see. Did they bring the stones kind of
just very rough to the site before they kind of finished them? Or how much work did they
do at the quarry before they brought it? - Well, I guess, you know, a lot of the answers
to a lot of these questions we really don't know, but it seems to me the obvious
way to handle them would be to bash away as much unnecessary material as
possible at the site where they're found, so that you have less weight to move in order
to get them from there to the job site. And, of course, if you've ever been to
Ollantaytambo - have you ever been there? - I've never been there. - Oh, oh, you've got to go. - I want to. - Oh, it's a major Inca site that was abandoned
under construction, and the quarry is still there, and all of what they were doing in the quarry
there is evident to anybody that knows what to look for, and the quarry was a long ways from
the job site, and you can see evidence all over the quarry of stones being roughly shaped
before being transported to the job site. - Oh excellent, yeah, so then how would
they have gotten them to the site? - That's another way in which the Incas
were, as far as we can see, quite unlike other cultures that did so much work with stone.
The only evidence we have of a stone being moved by the Incas is a drawing in the book by Guaman
Poma de Ayala called "A Letter to a King," in which he shows a picture of a stone being
dragged directly on the ground by a bunch of guys, with ropes tied around the stone, and
their supervisor is standing on the stone apparently hollering at them with some
sort of a little whip in his hands, and the chroniclers say that the Incas tended to
simply drag stones directly on the ground, but it sounds a little fanciful when you
apply it to the stones the size of those at Saqsayhuaman. However, my good friend
and colleague Jean-Pierre Protzen, another architect like us, who's done a lot of... did a
lot of work on this - he's now passed away - but he did a lot of work on this, and he closely
examined the quarries at Ollantaytambo, including the stones that were abandoned in
transport between the quarry and the ruin site at Ollantaytambo, and by the way, some of the stones
at Ollanta are the size of those at Saqsayhuaman, so what he found would apply to stones of the size
of Saqsayhuaman. And what he found was that one side one of the broad sides had typically been
smoothed off in a vaguely convex shape, and the edges were often turned up, beveled up, so as to
not dig in, and he even found, when he rolled them on to the side, so he could examine this convex
base, he even discovered drag marks on the stone, indicating which direction it had been pulled in,
and this applies to stones as much as 80 tons. And so there's a famous one right alongside the
road, just outside the town of Ollantaytambo. It just looks like a great big stone boat, and
it was being dragged on the ground by a huge long column, presumably of pullers.
There were no sleds involved. - So just dragging it, huh? - Unbelievable. And we've done, he and I,
have both done the mathematics on it and uh... - Yeah, how many men would you need? - Well, one of the examples that I just mentioned
of stones at that site being abandoned en route includes three that are in a direct line. The
road that they were being dragged on is now gone, because it's out in the middle of
a farm field. However, presumably these three stones were being dragged one in
front of the other along an old haul road. And so what I did is: I went out there, and I
measured all three stones, came up with a pretty good approximate... a pretty good weight for each
one, and then measured the size of the haul roads that we still find in the quarry and going
up to the ruins, and they're all, almost all, about six meters wide, and so that gives you some
idea how many columns of pullers you could have. And then if you measure the
distance between...[phone dings] - Go ahead. - If you measure the distance between the second
and the third stones in line, and the first and the second stone in line, you get a feel for how
many ranks of people you could fit in that space. So you end up with a rectangle of space about
six meters wide, as long as the distance between the stones that you can fill with pullers,
and that gives you some idea. Of course, you don't know exactly how far apart they were
and how close together they were on the ropes, but if you give them each a meter, for example,
to work in, you come up with a number of people, and if you apply that to the weight of the
stone and assume that it was being dragged directly on the ground, you come up with
a coefficient of friction of about 0.5, and if you apply those numbers, then you get,
you come up with, a rule of thumb that, if you take the stone and multiply its tonnage by ten,
that's how many people it would take to pull it. - I see. Why didn't they...
why didn't they... I mean, I think i read somewhere - it might have been you
who said - you don't pull stones, you push them. Why wouldn't they just put them on logs
or something and push them along that way? - Well, they... for one thing,
that terrain is very hilly, and you know the quarry that I'm talking about
is up on the side of a huge mountainside. It's just... and it's a giant talus field is
what it is, just boulders everywhere. And it turns out that it takes a lot of time
and effort to build a haul road sufficient to use rollers and that sort of thing. You know,
rollers - I've worked with... I've done a lot of work with big rocks, you know, in the field,
just playing with them and testing out theories and stuff like that. Rollers are very difficult to
work with. They have to be all the same diameter, they all have to be perfectly straight, they
have to be perfectly round, the road has to be perfectly flat, and all of these conditions
are very difficult to meet in the field. Even the Egyptians very seldom, I think, used
rollers. They used them inside the tombs and inside the monuments, where they could
create a perfectly flat surface, because they were rolling around on paved surfaces
and stuff, but once you get out in the field, it's very hard to make rollers work. They bunch
up under the load, they go crooked. The load - if there's the slightest angle off to the side, or
not angle but slope to one side or the other, the the load immediately tries to turn that way,
and you're constantly fighting it and everything. So it takes a lot of work and a lot of effort
to create a good haul road, and if you're dragging stones for a long distance, it's almost
more trouble than it's worth. And these guys apparently had enough workers and so forth so they
could avoid that problem by just dragging them. - Mmm hmm. All right. Let's talk about
what happens when they get to the job site. Now, I read you came up with this
idea of of coping and scribing. Could you explain a little bit about that? And is
that still your view that that's how they did it? - It is still my view, but it takes a little
explanation. The first thing you would do is: you would drag all these stones to a
staging yard someplace near the work, rather than try to show up one stone at a time,
because the guys at the quarry had no idea where a particular stone was going, and the guys at
the job site just had to take what came, and of course they were assembling a wall, and they had
a particular opening to fill, so what they needed was a large supply of stones in the storage yard
to choose from. So obviously the stones didn't go directly from the quarry right to the job site.
They went to a staging yard, where they were organized in such a way that the foreman could
pick the ones that they wanted for the spaces that they were currently working on at that moment.
So... but the fitting question that you asked really brings into focus three possible methods
that I can see. The first is trial and error, of course, and if you read the Spanish chronicles
of the period, that's the one they all favor. In fact, that's the one they describe as being
used with small stones - relatively small stones. None of the chroniclers talk about, except for
one, talk about using stones the size of those at Saqsayhuaman, so they're really talking about the
smaller stones that you see all over Cuzco. These are stones we call one- or two-man stones. You
can just pick them up. You know, they're heavy, but they're not that heavy. And it turns out that
again my friend J.P. Protzen did an experiment in the quarries down at Rumicolca, down the
river from Cuzco. It's an andesite quarry, and he showed that by pre-shaping the next stone
to be on the... fit into the wall, and then chopping away a surface, a seat for it to sit
on, and then leaving the dust on the seat, and setting that pre-finished upper stone in
the dust very carefully, and then removing it, you can see a pattern in the dust that shows where
the high points are, and so you get your hammer out, you chop away at those high points a little
bit, and you do the same thing all over again, and you find fewer and fewer high points, and if
you do that long enough, pretty soon you've got a perfect fit. So he did that with two blocks,
roughly the size of an 8x8x16 concrete block. So these were stones easy to move, and easy therefore
to carefully pick up and carefully replace. What he didn't do: he didn't fit a bedding joint,
which is the base of the stone and an adjacent rising stone at the same time, which if you study
the ruins at Saqsayhuaman carefully, you can see was what was being done all the time. The walls
are festooned with l-shaped joints, where it's clear that the upper stone was led into the
one next to it and beneath it in one operation, one big l-shaped joint. And he didn't do that, but
i think that by smearing mud on the rising face, so that it wouldn't fall off, you know, and then
carefully putting the stone diagonally into the space touching both the rising and the bedding
face, you could do the same thing that he did. So he showed that, yes indeed, there's a place to fit
small stones of the kinds you see all over Cuzco by trial and error, and it's not all that hard,
and clearly that's what the chroniclers saw when they got there, because they hired the... well,
hired is not the right word, of course... they forced the Inca masonries to build more walls
for them. A lot of the walls in Cuzco were built after the arrival of the Spaniards but by
Inca builders. So they saw the Incas doing it, and they knew how it was done. The problem with
the big ones, the problem with the big stones, is that we don't know of any easy way to
carefully pick up and carefully replace a big stone that was available to the Incas. There
are places to do that, there are ways to do that, to move them, move a big stone in and out of
position, but almost all of them would just disturb this pattern in the dust: that work that's
needed to figure out what to do next, you know, where the high points are, and I don't know of
any method they had for moving certainly even the stones of Hatunrumiyoc, for example, right down in
Cusco, but certainly the stones of Saqsayhuaman I don't think they had any method of doing that that
didn't involve disturbing the pattern in the dust, and so it's very unclear to me exactly how the
Incas would have solved that part of that problem to use the same method on the big
stones that they did on the small ones. - I see, so you are leaning away
now from the trial and error theory, thinking that might not be the way they did it? - I just don't see how that they had the
ability to do that. It would also, of course, with a huge stone like those
at Saqsayhuaman, be enormously time-consuming and unbelievably genius
time-consuming and probably dangerous, and so you know, if you try to imagine doing
what I just described with a big stone, even using the methods they had available,
you're talking a gigantic project. - Yeah, yeah. - Okay, so many people have suggested
to me getting away from that problem by using templates of some sort, using some
mock-up of the stone, instead of the stone itself, and presumably the template is lighter-weight,
easier to move, blah blah blah. You can use the same method, but you're using something like a
balsa wood stone rather than the stone itself. - I see. - The problem with that is you would have to
pre-finish the next stone to go in the wall, then you would have to make a perfect
negative impression of it somehow that's accurate to tolerances of a millimeter.
Then, from that negative impression, you'd have to make a perfect positive impression
to tolerances of a millimeter, and that positive impression would be the object you would
move to use templating to finish the stone, and it would have to be a lightweight enough to
be easily movable but stable enough to resist the shrinkage of dry weather, the expansion of
wet weather, constant movement back and forth, God knows how many times, by a rough construction
crew. What materials and methods did they have to make such a template out of? I'm unaware of
it. We would have a hard time doing that today. - So if it's not trial and error, and it's
not the template, then what else is there? - Well, I was, as you know, I'm an architect,
and I practiced for a long time time up in Jacksonville, Wyoming, and I was trained back east
at Princeton, but when I got up there, back in... this was back in the early 60s, they were still
building a lot of stuff out of logs: log cabins. And I watched the old log scribers put logs
together, and I said, wait a minute. You know, these guys are scribing these logs together, and
they get a perfect fit every time. No trial and error involved. They take a lumpy-shaped log, and
they scribe it onto a lumpy-shaped log down below, and they roll it into place one time, and it
fits, and if it doesn't fit, all the other guys give them, you know, hell about it; the
boss fires them and hires a different scriber. And so I said, well, that's exactly what
the Incas were doing with big rocks. I wonder how that process could be transferred
to big rocks, and that's where the idea came from. And of course, scribing is a
well-known technique. It's even still used by people that aren't building log
cabins. For example, if you have a stone wall in your house, and you want to put a
nice bookshelf or a cabinet next to it, what the carpenter will do is, on that side of the wood
construction, he'll leave a fairly wide board, and then he will take that construction, set it
against the stone wall, and he'll take an object very much like a craftsman's compass, and it has
a pointer on one end and a pencil on the other, except it will have a level on it so that
it's always in the same orientation and space, and he'll just run that compass down the face of
the rock. He'll run the pointed end down the face of the rock keeping the level-bubble centered, and
the pencil will then draw precisely that pattern of the face of the rock on that widened board, and
then he just takes his jigsaw, and he cuts along that pencil line and slides the construction
against the wall, and it fits perfectly. - Well, what if you're fitting,
you know, something with three... well, it would be three
sides that they have to worry about? - Yeah. - So if they did it with
stone, how would that work? - Yeah, let's start with the lowest
course, the first course at Saqsayhuaman. You've seen pictures, and all the joints between
the stones are typically long, more-or-less straight, vertical joints, and that's where
the biggest stones are, by the way, typically, except at the corners, and that's another...
that's a structural matter. They're put at the corner because that's the weak point in a zigzag
wall, and so they put the big stones there. But anyway, the lowest course at Saqsayhuaman
is these large stones fitting together on these more-or-less vertical straight joints. I'll
call them I-shape joints. And in that case, that's the easiest way to imagine using my method
on stones. If you take two of those stones and set them far enough apart where several guys can
work between them, the first thing you've done, of course, is you've picked two stones that
are kind of the same shape to start with, because again you want to chop as little as
possible, in order to make the fit, right? - Yeah. - Okay, you set them next to each other
so a couple of guys can work between, and then what you do is you start chopping
away those faces, so that a simple stick that is initially slightly longer than the longest
distance between the stones... and you chop away at those two surfaces, so that no matter where you
put the stick it exactly fits between the stones. - Ah. - Now the ends of the stick have to be...
the stone at the ends of the stick have to be the two stones... the two pieces of the stone
that are touching when you slide it together. So that tells you that the stick, just like
the the carpenter's compass with the bubble, has to be kept level and straight.
It can't... you can't wobble around. It's got to have the same orientation and space
at all times. So you make it a fork stick, and on the fork you put a plum bob that
keeps it from going up and down, end to end. - Ah, that's how they did leveling
before the modern level was invented. - Exactly, exactly, and I found plum bobs. I had
one here in my... I found Inca plum bobs. They had them all over the place. And you also have
to keep it from rotating around the plumb line, and you do that by starting at the outer
face of the stones, creating a... cutting an edge joint on each stone and then carefully
measuring in from that edge as you go back, so that the distance back to each end of the stone
is always exactly the same. And if you do those two things, and you do this very, very carefully,
you only have to move the stones one time. - That's right, yeah, and it should fit, right? Yeah. And then you just
go side by side down the lower course like that. - Right, right, exactly, and the other thing to
keep in mind with this method is it doesn't make any difference whether the surfaces are flat.
In fact, the surfaces probably won't be flat. They'll have a certain warp to them that follows
the original irregularity of the stones, so... - But isn't it harder to do one on top,
because you can't put the stones side by side? - Right. That's where you get into the hard part.
The scribing method is exactly the same, although in that case you have to scribe the rising
joint and the bedding joint at the same time. You can't do one and then the other. And what
that means is you have to, instead of your scribe being in a horizontal position, your scribe is
in a diagonal position, roughly at 45 degrees, so that you go down the rising face and just go
right around the corner into the bedding face, meanwhile keeping the same distance from
the face and keeping the plumb bob straight. - It'd be just like if it was a
curved side, I guess, you know, or... - Exactly. - Yeah, yeah. - Exactly, and that's why if you look at those
L-shaped joints, the corner at the bottom is always a round corner. It's never a square
corner. You hardly ever see a square corner in Inca work. In fact, that's a whole 'nother
subject, but we could get into that later maybe. - Wouldn't you have to hold the rock up above
the other rock? So what would you use for that? - The rock has to be placed so that you can use
the scribe in that orientation, and the way you would do that is you would suspend the stone, the
next stone, even the big ones, above and offset from the side of the rising face of the seat that
you're trying to create below. You would pre-shape the upper stone, and then you would prop it up
in that position, and the way I showed it in my original paper, the one that you've read, of
course, it looks pretty unstable, and nobody wants to go under there and do anything, let
alone chop away at any of the stones, and um... - So you came up with a better idea. - Yeah, well, yeah, the better idea is that you
have a retaining wall at the back of the joint, and the rear of the stone that you have
suspended is supported on that retaining wall, and only the front edge, the edge that
will be exposed when the job is done and and the wall is backfilled, the front
edge is what's propped up on the log posts. And that's the other thing at
Saqsayhuaman. If you've looked at it carefully, you will see many of the stones have sort of, you
know, computer-sized, square or slightly-rounded pockets along the lower faces of the stone.
Many of them just have a great big overhang on the lower face of the stone, and so all of those
features were places where the tops of these posts could support the stone in this position that...
this is my my theory anyway. And people often say, "Oh my god. Those stones are too heavy. They
couldn't possibly work." Not true. You know, you take an 8-inch, 10-inch log on end - it will
support thousands of pounds. I mean, you know, wood in that configuration, where it's not
being bent, it's just being compressed, is a very strong material. Even soft wood
like lodgepole pine that we had up in Wyoming, you know, it's a thousand pounds per square
inch. Well, you take a, you know, 10-inch thing, you're talking thousands of pounds:
50-60,000 pounds of supportive weight, and there are usually at least three, or sometimes more, of
these posts underneath the front edge. Actually going through getting it there, and putting the
posts in place, and then taking them away at the end, and then finally lowering the stone - all
of those things are tricky, but they're not for people like the Incas that were clearly very
good at messing with big rocks. They're not undoable at all. They're not difficult.
They're just... you have to do it right. - Very interesting. Yeah, that seems to be
the most efficient way. Now, I guess they would get good at it enough where they could
do it relatively quickly, I don't know, but... - The thing about it is that at least you're
only moving the stones one or two times. You're not trying to move it, you know,
30 times or a hundred times or whatever. - Yeah, because that's the hardest part. - Who knows how many times you have
to move it to use trial and error. - Yeah, very interesting. It's a magnificent
achievement, those walls and yes, the funny thing about it is: it's so impressive
that's why people come up with all these strange theories about how the Inca couldn't have done
it, but really, I guess you would say the the most difficult part would just be to figure out
how to do it, not to actually do it, right? Yeah. - These guys were wizards at messing with
stones. You know, stone to the Incas was a luminous material. I mean it wasn't
just a building material to them. That's why Inca stone masonry is not carved
with all sorts of patterns in it, typically, or you know, it's not used like other people did.
The stone itself is the point, and that's why they just left them raw, you know, or with their
faces, you know, and it's absolutely beautiful. Catch it in the right light and so forth, and it,
you know, they are totally unadorned stone walls, and yet they are absolutely gorgeous. When
you get there, you look at them and you say, Holy shit, did these guys have their
their shit together or what?" you know. And you'll find, you'll also find, stones...
Pisac is a good example of this, where they're building these walls right on cliffs, you know,
where the face of the wall bleeds right into a 300-foot cliff at the bottom, and then the first
row of stones perfectly fit into that cliff, and the rest of the stones go up, so they didn't
even have one side of the wall to work in, and yet they managed to do it, so these guys had serious
stone working techniques at their disposal. - If you’d like to read any of Vince’s material
on Sacsayhuaman or other megalithic sites, you can find it on his website.www.vince-lee.com. As for the question about whether there is some
kind of cultural connection between the polygonal masonry work around the world, keep in mind that
if correlating them means you have to divorce them from their historical contexts - by ignoring
their dates, the distinguishing differences between them, the surrounding features, the
histories of the sites, it’s more likely that they were developed independently, just as
regular rectangular course masonry often was. The Inca architects of Sacsayhuaman
ought to be lauded for their work. They created a masterpiece of
design and technical achievement. The layout of the walls into the hillside
and the leveling of the esplanade in front show great sophistication and a respect for the
landscape. They transformed it by preserving its features and integrating the man-made with
the natural. And then there is the stonework, a stunning testimony to the organizational skills
and the technical know-how of its builders. The walls are monumental and imposing, but also
subtle in detail and majestic in appearance. They’re fantastic. The Inca clearly wanted to
show what they knew and what they were capable of. If anyone else would like to leave me a
question on my voicemail, you can do so at speakpipe.com/DavidMiano. I can’t guarantee
that I will answer every voicemail I receive. It depends on how many I get and what you ask
about. If it is a question about prehistoric times, or about medieval times, I am less likely
to answer it. Ancient history questions are best, and how interesting I think the general
audience will find it is important too. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.
