Peru glaced stones

There are two lines of enquiry that converge to this page: the first is the problem of how the builders of the stone structures at Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo could reach the combination of massivity and precision of their constructions. The other line comes from the images in the Peru sculptures and Marcahuasi galleries. It does not need require much imagination to come to the conclusion that in order to make the images, the builders used the existing structure of the terrain as their basis. Upon this basis they worked to get the desired result. Again, there is a problem in how this result was obtained. Many of the features are not consistent with the process usually associated with working on stone: hacking it away by some way or another. The first picture below shows this most clearly: if one accepts the elephant, surely there must have been some effort to get this result, and this effort looks much more like the shape of the stone has been fluidly changed then by hacking. Pictures 2 and 3 show the fluidished phenomenon even more dramatically. Pictures 4 to 14 show more signs of the material having been worked upon by moulding it. Picture 15 shows a direct contrast with the result expected when hacking the stone.

If one accepts the moulding theory, the next step is to determine how the state of fluidity or mouldability is reached. Clues for this can be found in pictures 16 to 19.  Pictures 11, 13, 15, 18 & 19 are from the site Ancient walls by Richard Nesbit.

1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20

More data on the possibility of the use of a mouldable stone technique is found in the Toolmarks gallery.

Addendum: The conclusions above were reached purely on basis of the data available. Later searches turned up similar conclusions by others, using similar arguments, see e.g. sources 1, 2. This shows the strength of the available data, in that it satisfies one of the essential criteria of good science: using the same data, different people come independently to the same conclusions (see the editorial page, or good science).