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Why do they never think people can stack rocks?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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No.
A decade or so ago, we owned a small rural house in Pennsylvania where the roads in the area were lined with 5' high stone walls. Turns out, about a hundred years before, a rich family (for whom there were towns in the area named) had built themselves a giant stone mansion nearby, and to do so, they imported a bunch of Italian stone masons, and built little houses for them in the surrounding lands. To keep them busy when they weren't working on the mansion (or whatever other projects they were doing), they had them build all of these roadside walls.
Everything was dry laid. No morter, nothing. Just rocks, stacked in top of one another. Not even particularly regularly shaped; they just jigsawed them together. The walls were 5' high, 2' across at the top and maybe 3' at the base, and they lined every road for miles around. And this was the busywork these guys did.
I'm most places, these walls had stood unmoving for decades - again, with no morter or joining. When we bought our place, some previous owner wanted an actual driveway instead of just a road to the barn and had simply pushed a hole through the wall with a bulldozer and left these giant stones alongside the driveway.
A few years in, we hired some local Amish guys to use the stone to build proper end-cap pillars for the driveway. Those guys also did not use morter, except on the caps to make little roofs. They just lego'd the pillars out of the left-over stone, and we got a small discount for letting them take whatever they hadn't used. I have no idea what these stones weighed, but certainly several hundred pounds each. The work crew was 3 guys, and no heavy machinery. They arrived in a pickup truck, were dropped off, and were picked up at the end of the day (it did take them a couple of weeks to do the job). They partially deconstructed the ends of the wall to integrate the pillars; it looked all of a piece at the end.
I think you greatly underestimate people's ability to stack rocks, especially healthy, fit men used to labor.
P.S. I'm not saying it doesn't take skill; I couldn't have done it, even when in my prime; not well anyway. Not the first time. But none of those ziggurats were anyone's first time stacking rocks.
Would you be able to show a picture of what you're talking about? Not because I doubt your story or their abilities, but I'm convinced that the difference in precision would be immediately apparent. If it weren't, we would not be scratching our heads about how these structures were built thousands of years ago.
Some people in this thread seem unaware that there really is no explanation about how these stones were so precisely cut. So when someone starts arguing about how it's "just stacking rocks" or coming up with anecdotes to insinuate the feasibility with just some skill and persistence, it displays a lack of understanding of the issue in my opinion.
Nobody is arguing that it's hard to stack rocks, but we are dabbling in quantum mechanics yet we have no explanation for the precision achieved in these structures. Just because it isn't likely to be aliens or ancient wisdom from Atlantis doesn't mean that dismissive oversimplified explanations are justified.
Oh, yeah. I took tons of photos of those walls over the years. Most of them are in archives, though; like I said, we lived there over a decade ago, but I have one in my front photo album:
I do have a picture of one end pillar, but that has pointing, and it's not obvious that pointing is aesthetic and not structural mortar (although it is often applied over mortered stone). Anyway, you can't tell the stone isn't mortared b/c of the pointing, so it isn't a useful illustration.
That photo above, however, is clear there's no mortar, and yet that hundred y/o wall is astonishingly straight and level.
That picture illustrates my point though. It's just a wall with stacked stone, something very common to see, especially as a European. The difference with OP's pictures is immense, and given the difference in age only makes it more puzzling.