Notes

Stoned, For All Eternity
A good deal has been discussed and made much of in alternative archaeology books about how exactly and just why our technologically primitive ancestors could actually carve out, transport and erect massive multi-ton stone blocks into megalithic monuments of well, monumental size. The implication is that while there is no doubting the existence of these structures, our ancestors must of actually possessed an advanced technology or had the help of those that did (i.e. - 'ancient astronauts'). That runs unlike the standard style of scholarly archaeology. But the questions remain.

Perhaps I'd better say what I mean by massive multi-ton stone blocks. After all stones that are at the very least several tons in weight, up to the biggest known carved (but nonetheless in-situ and unused) stone block weighing in at roughly 1250 tons. That's not the record however for there is, apparently, a stele base in China that weighs about 16,250 tons. I mean these are stones that are not trivial to toss around, even today. And while not absolutely all major continents and countries have megalithic stone monuments, like THE UNITED STATES (USA & Canada) or Australia (including New Zealand) that still leaves a great deal of places, and well known places, that do.

How and why these megaliths were constructed is not any trivial matter. For the ancestors to go to such lengths and expend such efforts, well these stone monuments were obviously very important to them, and it's important to us to determine how and just why they achieved it. Using large stone blocks rather than wood or even small stone blocks or bricks must have served a purpose despite the greater hardships involved. So, why did our ancient ancestors need large stones; and how did they handle them?

As to the why, presumably, for starters, if you opt to use stone, then it's important enough a material serving a purpose(s) that necessitates lasting for several practical purposes an 'eternity'. If you build something to last, at least back then, you utilize stone, the larger the higher. But also for what purpose did the ancients need such megalithic giants?

Issues Arising: Purpose

These ancient societies or cultures spent a lot of resources to create items that were relatively peripheral with their basic needs. The Easter Islanders could survive without those Moai statues; ancient Egypt would still have been a 'superpower' even without those pyramids, the Giza Sphinx, massive statues of some New Kingdom pharaohs (like Ramesses II - often called Ramesses the fantastic), stele and obelisks. The Parthenon in Athens was just a shrine to one of the Greek deities (Athena), and similar observations could possibly be extended to the a large number of other monumental megalithic temples and monuments all over the world that have been mainly ceremonial in function.

It's difficult to figure out how Stonehenge contributed to the basic survival needs of the neighborhood population - you don't have to construct something of this magnitude just to tell you what season it really is! If you want to mark, say the Summer Solstice, all you have to have is really a traditionally and permanently well marked and easily identified Point A, where you can observe some fixed structure like a rock on the Horizon, that's Point B, and when sunlight arises directly over Point B, that's the longest day of the year. There's no have to engage in any kind of backbreaking toil or construction whatever.

If a society can afford to spend time and effort and money on secondary projects, say like in modern society various public art works in comparison to primary projects like roads (transport), schools (education) and hospitals (health care), then you have to conclude that that society was well off given that they could divert basic resources from primary projects to undertake projects of a second nature. Either that, or whatever looks to us as relatively trivial or unimportant like Stonehenge or Carnac (Brittany, France) or those Easter Island statues or the Sphinx actually held a primary function incomprehensible to us but which rivalled in importance housing and insuring adequate food supplies and similar things crucial to their day-to-day survival.

Issues Arising: Logistics

Additionally, there is the logistics problem. You need a large workforce that had to be fed and clothed and housed and looked after, especially fed. There wasn't exactly a nearby supermarket where endless supplies could possibly be purchased. Further, while employed on these quarrying, transporting and construction projects the workers couldn't be gainfully employed elsewhere to provide basics like hunting and gathering for food and even tending to domesticated livestock and agricultural crops. The workers couldn't have already been useful for serving in the army, or any useful and necessary task. All of this carving, transporting and construction were not just busy work made to keep the rabble off the streets and out of trouble, and slave labour wasn't usually in vogue either, unlike many popular Hollywood images. Needless to say regarding the Giza Sphinx, it had been carved, but wasn't transported, nor constructed per say. Still, the logistics in caving that massive stone statue from the rock outcrop would have been enormous, and the reason why(s) for doing so of vast importance to the powers-that-be.

Issues Arising: Ways and Means: The How!

Though our focus and interest is frequently on the construction phase, as in how was that done, that's usually just one-third of the hard yards. Take those 2.3 million blocks that define the Great Pyramid at Giza. Phase One: each block needed to be carved to size. You just didn't hack out rocks at random and put them in place. That carving alone is hard yakka and helped continue circumstances of full employment. Hard yakka Phase Two was transporting those carved blocks from the many quarries - some local, some not - to action city, the Giza Plateau. More full employment. The how in Phase One and Two isn't usually all that mysterious - just bloody hard backbreaking work. Anyway, back to the construction - Phase Three.

To me the major mystery isn't so much how you get something from the horizontal to the vertical, as an obelisk, (that was demonstrated on the NOVA TV series "Secrets of Lost Empires"), but the method that you get a massive multi-ton stone block raised straight up, say 20 to 30 to 40 or even more feet to do something as a lintel, like those at Stonehenge or on those Greco-Roman and Egyptian temples, like say the Parthenon. You can always conceive of building sand or dirt ramps to haul massive lintels upwards into place, hence removing the sand or dirt after-the-fact, but if you think about any of it, such infrastructure is a a lot more labour intensive and an all-round major project in its right. For instance, constructing a sand ramp to haul those multi-ton stone blocks for the Giza pyramids would need a greater volume of material to be placed into place (and of course later removed) than that of the volume of material required to build the pyramid involved in the first place. Of course if the project is that important, and if there is just no alternative way - well almost always there is those hard options.

To illustrate for example of precisely how bad our understanding of our remote ancient ancestors really is, here is a trilogy of extracts from classical scholar Nigel Rodgers in his text "The ANCIENT GREEK LANGUAGE World: People and Places" (2010):

"[T]he Greeks relied on their intellectual powers and their remarkably skilled craftsmanship to erect their buildings. Few details survive of these actual building techniques, however."

"Cranes were almost certainly used to help raise the masonry around the temples during construction, although no traces of such machinery have been found."

"The way the Athenians assembled these temples, and indeed housed and fed the large, highly skilled workforce required to build them, so efficiently is unknown."

So, now let's look at alternatives as offered in some alt-archaeological texts.

One theory sometimes observed in alt-archaeological tomes is that these massive blocks didn't begin as massive blocks, as being a brick doesn't start out as a brick, but instead they were poured into place, in a mould, like concrete or cement. Sorry, but modern petrologists' could easily detect such. Often in fact the quarry from where in fact the stone originated can be precisely identified, though that often raises the question then of transport, because the distances twixt quarry site and construction site could be a huge selection of miles. That's a concern that applies to Stonehenge as well as a few of the stonework for the Giza pyramids.

If you really want to go far-out, star-scout, let's try antigravity! Anti-gravity is only obtainable in one form, dark energy. Dark energy is that mysterious antigravity force that's causing the expanding Universe to help keep on expanding at ever faster and faster rates, in defiance of gravity which should slow the expansion rate down. Alas, dark energy, which while dominant on the scale of the entire Universe, is trivial locally in accordance with Earth's intense gravity field.

Alt-archaeology texts are full of references to sound energy that levitates (negates gravity) and therefore massive blocks of stone can be floated around and put into place even with just the oomph of a child, just by making the correct sound at the correct level.. Sound of course can be focused. Everybody knows and appreciate the science of acoustics in theatres. Sound can shatter objects, well at the very least relatively fragile objects like wine glasses when put through the professional projections of the trained human voice (or equivalent). However, if you crunch the numbers, the energy required to negate gravity is way outside the realm of which sound energy can muster. Taking into consideration the cacophony of sounds the people produces daily, you'd think that all of the relevant elements would come together somewhere, sometime and 'just so' concerning produce levitation in something, levitation observed and photographed for the record. Alas, not so.

Jigsaw Puzzles

In some constructions, it's not just a matter of manipulating massive but irregular stone blocks but fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle, results that are immediately apparent at sites around the globe, like those from the Incan Empire. Precision carving in stone only using other stone or copper tools is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It's not simple; it's extremely exhausting and time consuming work. Double that whenever all your blocks aren't a typical square block decoration.


What Do Our Ancestors Say?

Pity that although the ancients left all types of images behind of these daily lives and culture, I think it is amazing that despite all of those multi-thousands of images from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Americas, etc. not just one shows an actual half-finished or partly constructed monument, such as a pyramid, or perhaps a temple like the Parthenon that's under construction, or whatever. That's highly anomalous IMHO, though there are images of ancient Egyptians transporting massive stone blocks.

However, even some of those ancient cultures were puzzled as to how their a lot more ancient ancestors achieved these megalithic 'missions impossible'.

There's something very odd when the natural descendents of 'primitive' natives resort to tales comparable to sci-fi or science-fantasy to take into account how their ancestors constructed, transported and erected massive stone monoliths.

Easter Islanders say that their Moai statues walked independently from quarry to their final resting (actually standing) place. Who am I to argue with first hand or on-the-spot observations, except Thor Heyerdahl's "Aku-Aku" team accomplished exactly the same with less elegant but with pure grunt power. Walking stone statues are just a bit too far into the "Twilight Zone" for comfort. Actually for some reason Easter Islanders at some point downed their stone tools and abandoned their statue constructions for reasons not entirely clear apart from priorities altered. The abandoned unfinished statues can still be seen today, lying set up, now long neglected.

Also in the Pacific region, Nan Modal can be an ancient city around 0.75 square kilometres off the coast of the island of Pohnpei in what's today termed Micronesia. The city is made up of artificial islands criss-crossed by canals, and therefore also known as the Venice of the Pacific. Those 'islands' however are built up of massive megalithic stone walls around 25 feet high. How so? Well the stones were continued site on the backs of dragons apparently. To be honest, that makes just as much sense as anything else.

I noted above that allegedly sound could levitate massive stone blocks. That theory or observation is situated in both SOUTH USA and ancient Egypt - massive stones are somehow lifted and transported by sound. I still think that's highly suspect and I believe scientists would need an actual modern-day demonstration. I understand I would.

Tentative Conclusions

As I noted above, it's not the caving or the transport that's the real issue, nor going from the horizontal to the vertical that's a real problem, rather the issue is lifting massive stones straight up that I especially puzzle over.

The puzzlement relates to our own use of stones in building projects. We could I guess, if we wished to, build our buildings out of mega-ton blocks of stone. But we don't. Your house, if it contains building stones at all, are stones that are probably comparable to weights of just several pounds, maybe a large number of pounds; hardly tons.

So do we've a significant mystery here? Well yes, particularly when compared to modern society as noted immediately above. Inside Dry Stone Walling Ossett -tech age, whenever we do use stone as a construction material, it's in manageable equipment. We don't build our homes or office buildings or ballparks or monuments out of multi-ton to multi-hundred ton stone blocks because the ancients did. However when duty called, like when Abu Simbel needed to be relocated to a higher elevation when the Aswan High Dam was constructed giving rise to Lake Nasser and the flooding of the historical site, even using modern tools it was still a significant and massive effort.

A Possible Solution

Perhaps we can kill two anomalous birds with one hypothetical stone.

Universal One: As we note, from the Americas (Mesoamerica and SOUTH USA at least); throughout Europe and the Near and Middle East, Egypt and other parts of Africa, even unto Asia and the Pacific region, you can find ancient megalithic constructions using stone blocks in the multi mega-ton range. How did the ancients carve, transport, raise and position such massive stone blocks?

Universal Two: Also around the globe, there is a universal theme of giants, from the Cyclopes in Greco-Roman cultures, to Biblical giants to - well you name the culture and I'll guarantee they have giants as a core aspect in their mythologies. For samplers, here's just a partial list of giants. Well there's Angrboda (Norse), Argos (Greek), Balor (Irish), Biloko (Zaire), Bungisngis (Philippines), the Cyclopes (Greek), Geryon (Greek), the Gigantes (Greek), Goliath (Biblical), Grendel (Anglo-Saxon), the Hecatonchires (Greek), Hrungnir (Norse), Humbaba (Mesopotamia), the Nephilim (Biblical), Skrymir (Norse), Suttung (Norse), Talos (Greek), the Titans (Greek), and Ymir (Norse). Further, you have all types of giant trolls and ogres (Scandinavian), various giant apemen like the Yeti and Bigfoot/Sasquatch and numerous others, in addition to the Giants of Cornwall (led by Gogmagog).

Well, what's 'mission: impossible' for a young child, is possible for a grown-up; what's 'mission: impossible' for adult humans might be possible for a giant(s). A giant twice as large as an average human could have eight times the muscle power, since muscles are 3-D, doubling long, width and height; and thusly 2 x 2 x 2 = 8.

What Do Our Ancestors Say Revisited?

Ancient Greeks often attributed various massive stone constructions to the Cyclopes, as an example. Such massive structures are termed the Cyclopean walls because the Cyclopes and only the Cyclopes could have built these structures. Perseus had them responsible for building the walls of Mycenae, like the Lion Gate; Proitos attributed them building the walls of Tiryns. The medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus cited the Roman ruins as evidence that giants must once have walked the planet earth. And who built the Giant's Causeway on the Northern Irish Coast?

Is this too far out? I'm available to other suggestions, but at the very least it generally does not require high-tech alien assistance, until those worldwide mythological giants, just like the Cyclopes, were aliens!

Appendix: A few notable megalithic monuments.

1) Some unfinished in-situ megaliths.

*Baalbek (Lebanon) has two unfinished stones weighing in at 1000 to 1250 tons apiece.

*There's an unfinished Egyptian obelisk at Assuan that's all up comes to roughly 1100 tons.

2) Some finished and transported megaliths.

Europe

*Stonehenge: some stones are around 40 tons.

*The Avebury stone circle, England, has as its largest stone one over 40 tons.

*The famous fortress of Mycenae, Greece has stones close to 100 tons in weight.

*The Parthenon in Athens, Greece has some of its largest stones weighing in at 10 tons.

Pacific Region

*Those Easter Island (Rapa Nui to the locals) Moai can think about to 70, even one up to 86 tons.

Ancient Egypt

*The Colossi of Memnon are two Egyptian statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III coming in at 700 tons each.

*Ramesses II (Ramesses the fantastic) was not shy about erecting statues to honour himself. One of is own numerous a large number of monumental statues commissioned to image self (at Luxor) - 100 tons worth of stone. But that's featherweight class.

*Ramesses II was only just getting warmed up. There is a statue at Thebes, Egypt, portion of the Ramessum, the mortuary temple of the pharaoh involved, of 1000 tons. Now that's heavyweight status.

*Egyptian obelisks weren't minuscule. There's one at 227 tons (Luxor); one at 328 tons (Karnak).

*Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt established fact as overkill in terms of constructing a tomb. Although average weight of each stone block is 'only' 2.5 tons, the largest slabs comprising the burial chamber, come in at 80 tons.

*Apart from the Great Pyramid, other Egyptian pyramids, in fact most, if not all other, Egyptian pyramids have some monolithic blocks of over 20 tons, including monolithic roof slabs, plugs and burial vaults, some of which weigh in at over 100 tons.

South and Central America

*Those popular but mysterious Olmec heads in Mesoamerica aren't trivial works when carved down to some 50 tons all up.

*The Inca city of Machu Picchu, Peru has large stones part and parcel of its construction weighing in from 20 to 50 tons apeice.

*There's an extremely famous Aztec calendar stone at Tenochtitlan, Mexico that weighs somewhat more than the wall calendar you hang up at home. Weight, 24 tons.

*Palenque, Mexico is a famous Mayan site, especially thanks to Erich Von Daniken. The largest stones on site weigh 12 to 15 tons.

Further suggested readings

Childress, David Hatcher; Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients; Adventures Unlimited Press, Kempton, Illinois; 2000:

De Camp, L. Sprague; The Ancient Engineers; Ballantine Books, New York; 1974:

De Camp, L. Sprague & De Camp; Catherine C; Citadels of Mystery; Fontana/Collins, London; 1972:

Hancock, Graham; Fingerprints of the Gods: A Search for the Beginning and the End; Mandarin, London; 1996:

Hancock, Graham & Faiia, Santha; Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization; Penguin Books, London; 1999:

National Geographic Society; Mysteries of Mankind: Earth's Unexplained Landmarks; National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.; 1992:

National Geographic Society; Mysteries of the Ancient World; National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.; 1979:

Von Daniken, Erich; Chariots of the Gods?; Souvenir Press, London; 1969:

Von Daniken, Erich; Gods from Outer Space; Souvenir Press, London; 1970:

Further viewings:

NOVA; Secrets of Lost Empires; PBS/WGBH, Boston; 2006:

NOVA; Secrets of Lost Empires II; PBS/WGBH, Boston; 2008:

There's also been a large number of books/videos written/produced specifically concerning the archaeological mysteries of Stonehenge, ancient Egyptian monuments including the pyramids, Easter Island, the ruins of Mesoamerica and SOUTH USA, etc. Check with your local library.

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