Ancient Stone Carving Technology | Stegosaurus from Cambodia

Our subscribers have been sending us photos of stone reliefs from Egypt, Lebanon and Indonesia, asking how such things could be made by hand, without modern power tools. Master stonemasons Vladislav Nikolaev and Denis Koguev from Saint Petersburg had an idea to demonstrate how it can be done. As a first try, they wanted to create something similar to the famed Stegosaurus from the Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia. This temple was built The anthropogonist team paid a visit to the site in 2018. Our stonemasons were inspired by this legendary relief, but decided to depict the Stegosaurus in a more anatomically correct way, in line with modern reconstructions of the animal. We bought a large block of shell rock, a type of limestone. Its characteristics are similar to the As we can see, the stone actively reacts with citric acid, releasing carbon dioxide bubbles in the process. According to geologists Pavel Solyvanov and Natalia Ugrimova, this demonstrates that it mainly consists of calcium carbonate, meaning it's basically organogenic plastic limestone. Here are your tools. A stonecutter's chisel. It's a chisel, right? Yep, that's right. Yeah, it looks fine to me. Iron tools were used called stonecutter's chisels. The principal tool used by Vladislav Nikolayev was specially forged for us at the Hammersmithy in the town of Yelets, Lipetsk region. Our thanks goes to the smith administrator Stanislav Yermakov. The 24 centimeter long chisel is made from the most common type of steel, known to medieval South Asian cultures as well. The material is viscous and porous. It's not like Carrara marble, on which you can carve delicate details. It's coarser, but still workable. It can be processed reasonably well. Our experts decided to decorate the top of the stone with a repeating floral pattern and inscribed the letters UPN at the bottom, the abbreviation of Uchani I only have good things to say about the chisel so far. It was contributed by our sculptor Denis, a very skilled craftsman and just a great guy. His chisels are also made from regular chilled iron. Nothing high-tech about them, no tungsten carbide pieces, no cheating. All right Vlad, our, your experiment is completed. Yeah, and I think it's gone quite well. How would you compare the result with the famous carved reliefs from Southeast Asia, such as Angkor Wat or the notorious Stegosaurus relief for example? Well, we kind of put a creative spin on the Stegosaurus and we also added these nice little leaf patterns above. The original carving is pretty eroded and the patterns are quite hard to make out, so it's our reimagining of it. Our relief may seem a bit brutal, but I don't think it's much inferior to the original. The stone has comparable properties, right? It does, yeah. Obtaining it was the hardest thing. This is shell rock and shell rock is pretty much as hard as sandstone. Working it doesn't feel any different from working sandstone. Someone may say, well, working this stone isn't much of a challenge, and they'll be right. Working it is pretty easy. Ancient stonemasons would take little time to work this type of stone. I carved the lower part, while the upper part was done by my friend Dennis. He's a sculptor by trade, so you can see the quality of his workmanship. If we'd regularly honed our skills as carvers, the experiment would have certainly taken less time to complete. What was the biggest challenge? I guess finding the right stone. Working it wasn't that difficult, as it's not as hard as granite or basalt or cabro. The entire project took about 35% hours to complete, and you be the judge. Now we're planning to have a shot at something more challenging. Have any ideas? Write your suggestions in the comments. Our team would like to thank the Prevelmeer Mester Studio and the Museum No. 7 Exhibition Centre for providing a workshop for our experiment.