Evolution Of Polygonal Masonry | From Ancient Times To The Incas | Quarrying, Tools & Methods

A few years ago I made a video talking about how the Incas could have shaped and joined their stone blocks, giving the smooth finish to the walls that we still see on many blocks now, half a millennia later. So in this video I'm going to be looking at why polygonal masonry was the building method of choice for certain walls and buildings, and how people were able to cut and transport the stones. But to start I'm going to give a brief overview of polygonal masonry before the Incas, as although the Inca culture are perhaps one of the best known cultures for their polygonal stonework, they are only around 600 years old, whereas polygonal masonry actually started thousands of years before that, and in its rough form was perhaps the first stone building technique used by humans. Polygonal masonry was first extensively used by the ancient Greeks from around 1000 BCE. The earliest Greek location we know which uses polygonal masonry is Attica, but this building method was also used by the ancient Egyptians at times, and possibly earlier than the Greeks. Although there are labels given for different types of polygonal masonry work, each type just appears to be either a variation or evolution of stone building over time and cultures, which could be due to many factors such as design decisions and workers' individual skill levels or creative visions, also needing to factor in things like the manpower and logistics required depending on the size of a project. The grand polygonal building style mostly faded out of use, and probably because of the cost and time to hire in the skilled workers needed, so they turned mainly to the more regular block work, as laying regular sized blocks could be done by much less skilled workers with a much greater workforce. When looking at even some of the oldest ancient stone sites we found, like Gobekli Tepe, which dates to around 9500 BCE, there are some very impressive stone structures for the time period in the complex, like the famous T-pillars, which clearly needed a lot of focused intelligence and problem-solving skills to cut and carve in place. But for the majority of the site, you can still see that most of the walls and buildings are built using random small irregular rocks, fitting them together as close as they can, which is like a first evolution of polygonal masonry. So obviously these would be more prone to dislodging and allowing the elements like wind and rain to leak through over time, so another 8000 years between then and the Greek era seems realistically more than adequate for the irregular block building method to have evolved to the point of using larger, more neatly fit together blocks. And the irregular shapes not only look more artistic and awesome, but also give structural strength to help withstand earthquakes and other natural factors. But because of the amount of time and work that would have gone into creating the precise tightly fitted polygonal blocks, these were usually reserved for things like city walls, bases, casing stones, and certain substructures. So mainly things they would have wanted to retain strength over time. You see this type of quality change and discrepancy everywhere, even in today's culture, where the most impressive blocks and buildings are places of importance, or are often just casing stones to places of importance. One of the easiest examples that comes to mind is how when you look at the Khafre pyramid in Egypt, you can still see the weathered casing stones at the top of the pyramid, which are still in reasonable condition for being exposed to the elements for the last four and a half thousand years. But where all the casing stones are missing, you see the contrast of the rough interior stonework compared to what was supposed to be visible. Now the Incas are one of the best known for their polygonal stonework, and you can see why. It wasn't just huge irregular shaped stones with a tight fit, but many of the stones appear to have an almost unnaturally smooth finish to them, leading many people to believe that they were possibly built using some type of lost ancient high technology, but I don't think it's really reasonable to consider that until we actually find evidence of it. The main tools that have been found at nearby quarry sites are mainly basic hammer stones, many of them, and ranging from around 500 grams to around 8 kilograms, which they would either pound by hand, or possibly tie to a stick to form a pickaxe of sorts, and through experiments done, researchers have pointed out that the heavier the hammer stone, the less effort overall needs to go into the bashing, as you let gravity do the majority of the work, and the heavier hammer stones would bounce, allowing them to be guided by momentum. Smaller hammer stones would then be used for some of the finishing and dressing work, and finer corners etc. The Incas didn't quarry many blocks the more traditional way that say, for example, the Egyptians did. The Inca seemed to have access to a lot more rock and loose material which had naturally broken around the area from mountains or cliffs due to the natural terrain and landscape, and they could also bash or use prying tools like wedges on the edge of a cliff to loosen the rock from a face, which also sounds like a pretty good way of making huge slabs of rock, so if you have a lot of loose rocks broken from mountains or cliffs, or cliffs that are easy to fracture the edges of, then it makes sense that you wouldn't go through the effort of quarrying bedrock like the Egyptians did if you had plenty of loose material and easy to break cliff faces readily available. This also helps support the choice for polygonal building, because they already had access to an abundance of rocks of random shapes and sizes lying around. On a fantastic channel called World of Antiquity, hosted by Dr. David Miano, he interviews an architect called Vincent Lee, who's done much work for many years on the Inca sites. He talks about his thoughts after all these years of how they cut, carved, and placed stone blocks, and he offers many down-to-earth insights, and I would advise watching the full interview. He admittedly doesn't know the exact method for some techniques used, but humans with levers and pulleys and hammer stones and perhaps counterweight techniques seems to be all that was needed for the majority of the work. Vince also mentioned some evidence around Ollantaytambo, and how a stone which has yet to be transported to its final destination, still in the quarry roughly pre-cut, has a smooth corner with clear drag marks on that corner, showing that they may have smoothed the specific dragging corner of the larger stones they needed to actually carry, and just used men and ropes to drag the stones. The majority of the stones used on many sites is shown to have most likely been quarried directly from the site, or relatively close, where they would have cleared a temporary dirt road for more consistency drag in the stones. And the larger stones are usually the ones used for the foundation layer, or on a corner, where the support is required the most, which both make sense structurally, and would be the easiest position to place the larger stones. Archaeologists and historians have done and continue to do a lot of amazing work to try and piece together the techniques and methods used with the tools and evidence they have available. The more I research though, just seems to show how smart our ancestors really were. They had all the brainpower and functions that we have now with focused intelligence, they were fantastic problem solvers, and we should give them so much credit for the awe-inspiring work they accomplished. If we do end up finding any evidence of a lost advanced culture, or anything else, then it may be worth looking into a more extravagant theory. But until then, all we ever find is human tools with human purpose-built structures gradually advancing in technique over time, with the greatest works usually created by an identifiable empire of that time period. Now that feels like a pretty natural progression from my perspective. So what do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below, but that will do it for this video. If you learned something, or enjoyed the content, please meet my good friends the like and subscribe button. I know that when you meet each other you'll just click. So goodbye for now, and take care out there.