The stones were shaped by hand, primarily using harder rounded stones (often quartz river cobbles), and I've seen a number of these in the stone quarries. They also used some bronze tools to extract blocks, but the shaping involving battering the blocks with the hammerstones. Moving the largest stones involved dragging them with ropes, and often required a thousand men or more. They only moved the largest stones over short distances of a few kilometers. The stones they moved up to Ecuador were still quite large, but only up to about 700 kg/1,500 lbs - these I suspect were carried on something made from wooden poles, like a litter. Archaeologists and other researchers have done quite a bit of work on these questions, and there is plenty of historical and archaeological evidence to show that the Incas were quite capable of doing these things using very basic technology in combination with the labor of many thousands of their subjects.

Originally posted by fulllotusqigong
reply to post by RA777

---

Debunking David Hatcher-Childress' new book on ancient megaliths in South America -- I have a response from a professor in archaeology, Dennis Ogburn, who specializes in South American archaeology in Peru and Ecuador:

The stones were shaped by hand, primarily using harder rounded stones (often quartz river cobbles), and I've seen a number of these in the stone quarries. They also used some bronze tools to extract blocks, but the shaping involving battering the blocks with the hammerstones. Moving the largest stones involved dragging them with ropes, and often required a thousand men or more. They only moved the largest stones over short distances of a few kilometers. The stones they moved up to Ecuador were still quite large, but only up to about 700 kg/1,500 lbs - these I suspect were carried on something made from wooden poles, like a litter. Archaeologists and other researchers have done quite a bit of work on these questions, and there is plenty of historical and archaeological evidence to show that the Incas were quite capable of doing these things using very basic technology in combination with the labor of many thousands of their subjects.

Originally posted by AGWskeptic
reply to post by fulllotusqigong

---

I don't have as much faith in carbon dating as you do.

www.allaboutarchaeology.org...

They could be off by 10,000 years or more.

Evidence for Long-Distance Transportation of Building Stones in the ... www.jstor.org/stable/4141586 by DE Ogburn - 2004 - Cited by 12 - Related articles BUILDING STONES IN THE INKA EMPIRE, FROM CUZCO, PERU. TO SARAGURO ... Wavelength-dispersive X-ray fluorescence determined the concentrations of nine ele- ments in samples ..... dating to the last 26000000 years (Miocene to ..