The case of the Puma-Punku megaliths

[tholden]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AABPXvwevVA

Anybody have any thoughts?

[GaryN]

Thats a new one on me, tholden, thanks.
I was reading how some recently unearthed ancient chinese artifacts tell of how people in flying machines came from the sky and taught all kinds of skills to the locals. I'm not saying aliens for sure, as if the Atlantis myths have any merit at all, then they may have come from there. So how many early cultures now tell the same story, and how many times do we need to be beat over the head with a 2x4 before we accept the fact? Or are we so afraid of the impications that we just can not even consider the idea as fact?

[tholden]

I don't really see "aliens" involved in this. What I do believe is that prior to the flood, there existed some sort of a bi or multi-planetary society in this system or at least the part of it which contained Saturn, Earth, and Mars, and one way or another, producing the kinds of multi-hundred-ton accurate stones you see at Puma-Punku out of granite or diorite would require the technical wherewithal of a space faring civilization.

Charles Ginenthal has mentioned the Davidovitz idea of liquifying hard stone and pouring it, which would be one possibility; I have my own idea as to how such stones might be produced, but it's unusual to say the least.

[tholden]

One idea I believe you can dispense with immediately is the possibility of anybody CUTTING those kinds of stones out of granite or diorite with any sort of normal cutting tools. The only thing you could conceivably cut diorite with is diamonds and the things are simply too big.

[Osmosis]

Then we can agree, the Puma-Punku megatiths, as with the EU in general cannot possibly exist?

[tholden]

If the things were cut it would have to have been with lasers or plasma torches or some such along with machines as good or better than the CNC machines used for rifle barrels and receivers. Moreover it would have to have been done with a care not to destroy or waste any more quarry material than absolutely necessary.

[solrey]

Due to my interest in sustainability and methods of natural building, I've studied many of the basic low-tech processes that are quite clever, simple and effective.

For example, fulcrums and pulleys are some of the oldest technologies in existence. Moving bulky objects weighing several tons is relatively easy with a small group of people and the proper use of fulcrums and pulleys. I've seen the Amish do it. I think finesse is becoming a lost art, people seem to be stuck on brute force these days.

Actually, there is a pretty simple method for quarrying and shaping large stones like that. Simple chisel like tools are used to just create stress cracks in whatever shape desired, and/or taking advantage of naturally occurring cracks and fissures, on exposed stone at the base of a hillside or cliff. A huge bonfire is lit against the stone and kept good and roaring for as long as it takes to heat the stone to several hundred degrees. This is either timed to coincide with approaching rains, or barrels of water are poured onto it from above, or it's just allowed to cool slowly. Either way, the heating/expansion and cooling/contraction, cracks the stone which slides out into an excavated area below the stone, or it might be pried out to slide downhill.
Placing one large stone on top of another, and using ropes and quite a few people, the top stone is rotated, or slid, back and forth which grinds the surface of both stones down to a smooth, perfect fit. Just flip, and/or stack, and repeat to polish/shape as many sides as necessary. The grooves and holes are likely produced using simple tools with a lot of persistent grinding and replacing the grinding tools frequently. Maintaining perfectly straight lines isn't difficult with a simple guide rail or "jig". A simple drill press can be made using wood to make a tripod with a stone at the top and near the bottom, with holes in the middle of them, through which a wood dowel slides through with a cutting stone/tool on one end. It works pretty much like the old trick of starting a fire with a stick, a string on a bow and a block of wood. Instead of a "lighter", it's a "drill".
It's a slow, tedious process requiring a huge, persistent workforce for many years. Pretty much a foreign concept in our world of instant gratification and soundbites.
How many people can even imagine what it took to create the Roman aquaduct system? Our modern public works projects seem to pale in comparison to even that.

I'm convinced that humans have been interacting with extraterrestrials since before recorded history. But, not to rain on this parade or anything, I also see no reason why structures like Puma-Punku couldn't be accomplished by people all on their own.

[tholden]

Some of those stones at Puma-Punku are diorite and have small and yet totally accurate grooves cut in them which are absolute straight and absolutely of uniform depth and width. There is no possible way to do that with any of the tools which standard theories allow for ancient humans to have.

[ElecGeekMom]

I saw an article a few years ago about an artifact that had been thought to be a ceremonial "bowl". It was some kind of metal, more than a meter across (if I remember correctly), and very highly polished. I believe it had been found in the Andes.

The article put out the idea that it was actually some kind of focusing mirror.

If the folks back then could have figured out how to produce some kind of laser using the strong sunlight in that location, focusing it, could they not have produced cut stones like the ones discussed in the video?

If nothing else, I have wondered if they built things like the Great Pyramid by putting a layer of stones in place, then using their "laser" to even up the surface before placing the next layer of stones, etc. These finely-cut-and-set edifices are located in sunny locales, aren't they?

I also tend to think that we do them a disservice by assuming that, since their stone structures have lasted this long, they made nothing else. I'm thinking that later peoples appropriated the monuments built before them, telling their neighbors that they had built the structures--wouldn't they earn a certain amount of respect (at least for a while)? But whenever they attempted to adorn them or build other structures, their efforts were more crude.

And why the emphasis on gold? I mean, you can't eat it--well, you can't live on a diet of it! You can't plow with it. It's so "soft" that you don't really build with it. But what if they knew its value as an electrical conductor? What if they did use electricity?

What if our civilization were destroyed by a global catastrophe or upheaval? What if the undersea areas were raised and the dry ground were submerged? All our little plastic geegaws and delicate glasswork and most ceramics would be just so much debris, and ultimately be ground or deteriorated into unrecognizable waste. Books would burn up or mold. CDs and DVDs would be unuseable.

One more thing--what if the earth were smaller back then? It would have been easier to move large blocks of stone, wouldn't it, because gravity would have been weaker.

[tholden]

There are two or three problems you'd need to solve to produce an Egyptian pyramid or one of these diorite stone structures in South America: You'd need to cut the stones or otherwise produce them; you'd need to get them to the building site; and the third thing which is important is that you'd need to devise a way to avoid wasting most of the stone at the quarry.

In other words, if you just started cutting stone blocks out of a rock quarry, you'd waste more than half the stone, particularly when cutting out the bottom of the block.

Some believe that the Egyptian pyramid stones were poured. ASSUMING you had a way to do that and leave the blocks looking as they do, you'd have solved all three problems. The idea would be to break out reasonably small stones at the quarry, haul them to the site in wagons, pile them into a form, and then pour some sealing liquid into the form to take up all remaining space.

But the stones at Puma-Punku are granite and diorite, vey hard stone. There is nothing which is normal or easy to visualize which would have sufficed; you're looking for a mad idea (the name of the forum section) here from jump.

IF the builders had some sort of a method of of liquifying and then resolidifying such hard stone, that might be what we're seeing, but that's a gigantic "if".

Or it might be that the material was CREATED in-situ, using some sort of a plasma physics Z-pinch effect. We're still talking about fabulous stuff in such a case, but it might not be totally impossible.


And then we come to the idea which has occurred to me recently.........

IF the people who built this stuff lacked the ability to liquify and resolidify hard stone but had laser cutters or some sort of a plasma cutting machine, then they might could have cut those stones, but they'd still have the problem of wastage if they tried to cut them separately at a quarry.

Think about it. When a lumber yard wants to make 2x4s and 2x6s, do they go into the woods, pick a tree, and start cutting 2x4s out of the tree with a chain saw??? Of course not, they'd waste half the wood. They cut the tree down, and haul it to a mill site where they can cut the needed lumber out of it in a rational manner.

Likewise, if ancients ever did cut those grantite and diorite blocks with space-age tools, they probably avoided extreme wastage by cutting some truly gargantuan piece of stone out of a quarry, hauling it to a cutting site, and cutting the blocks they needed out of it.

That of course would have required total control over gravity.

[StevenJay]

Since we already know about the elegant precision that can be attained with EDM technology, I would be inclined to think along those lines. A variation on that technology may have also been used as a method of transportation. And, the fact that the remains of whatever technology that was used - the devices themselves - seem to be, so far, completely absent, is very telling in itself. As if the builders were very cautious about taking their toys with them when they left, lest they fall into immature, irresponsible hands. One would not want to leave, say, a loaded pistol in a simian habitat. Especially after they had observed its use.

[soulsurvivor]

With the ongoing restoration effort with the Parthenon, some of those same questions keep coming up:
http://www.wimp.com/theparthenon

[mague]

Looks like ultrasound tools. Laser or plasma would leave traces, even after 15.000 years. Mars rover drills with ultrasound. Ultrasound drilling and cutting has the advantage that you dont have to sharpen the drill/blade. Vibrating diamonds with ultrasound could be a fun tool.

Oh, and we are able to create ultrasound without electricity. See dog whistle. I could imagine toothbrush sized and lung powered ones and bigger ones powered by bellows. If i wanted to be more adventurous i could imagine a long forgotten simple but effective piezo (Atlantis crystal myths) technology to create ultrasound. It would be easy to build wooden racks as guiding rail for the tool and then move the tool manually along it. The cuts would be as perfect as we see them now.

I could imagine that sound played a role when moving the stones as well. Its an evergreen school experiment. Heavy vibrating objects loose massively friction. They almost hover. I think people recognized this by observing earthquakes. Soil can turn into a state where it seems liquid. Out of that experience it is not to far fetched that heavy stuff moves due to vibration.

But i am not that much into the How. I am curious about the Why.

Someone using such construction kit blocks seems to be in a rush. Even if you have the technology to create and move such blocks you probably would still use smaller sized bricks if you just wanted to settle there. Also the sun gate is not finished. The left-top nine glyphs on the front of the gate are not finished. I cant help myself to think someone wanted to build this as fast as possible and it seems he was not fast enough and could not finish it.

[lizzie]

Mague said: If i wanted to be more adventurous i could imagine a long forgotten simple but effective piezo (Atlantis crystal myths) technology to create ultrasound.

What is Piezoelectricity?
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-piezoelectricity.htm

Piezoelectricity is a form of electricity created when certain crystals are bent or otherwise deformed. These same crystals can also be made to bend slightly when a small current is run through them, encouraging their use in instruments for which great degrees of mechanical control are necessary. This is called converse piezoelectricity.

The property of piezoelectricity is dictated by both the atoms in the crystal and the particular way in which that crystal was formed. Some of the first substances that were used to demonstrate piezoelectricity are topaz, quartz, tourmaline, and cane sugar. Today, we know of many crystals which are piezoelectric, some of which can even be found in human bone. Certain ceramics and polymers have exhibited the effect as well.

A piezoelectric crystal consists of multiple interlocking domains which have positive and negative charges. These domains are symmetrical within the crystal, causing the crystal as a whole to be electrically neutral. When stress is put on the crystal, the symmetry is slightly broken, generating voltage.

Piezoelectricity is used in sensors, actuators, motors, clocks, lighters, and transducers. Medical ultrasound devices create high-frequency acoustic vibrations using piezoelectric crystals. Piezoelectricity is used in some engines to create the spark which ignites the gas. Loudspeakers use piezoelectricity to convert incoming electricity to sound. Piezoelectric crystals are used in many high-performance devices to apply tiny mechanical displacements on the scale of nanometers.

Even though a piezoelectric crystal never deforms by more than a few nanometers when a current is run through it, the force behind this deformation is extremely high, on the order of meganewtons. This deformational power is used in mechanics experiments and for aligning optical elements many times

[nick c]

Tiahuanoco and the Puma-Punku megaliths were built by a civilization using quality steel tools, which is needed for carving the harder types of stones. They were built at or slightly above sea level (probably during a period when gravity had a lesser felt effect than today enabling the people to transport heavy stones miles from the quarries and construct the megalithic city.) After a cosmic upheaval the the Andes were catastrophically thrust up, moving Tiahuanoco, Lake Titicaca, etc. up to the 12,500 foot elevation. There are remains of corn fields that supplied the city, some at even higher elevations, yet corn will not grow any where near that altitude today. Agassiz pointed out that marine crustaceans are found in Lake Titicaca. There are other towns and remains of human habitations, raised beaches, and undecayed sea shells high in the Andes. Also there are several intermediate surf lines, indicating the mountains rose in several "spurts" probably in a short period. The time frame for this is measured, imhop, less than 10,000 years before the present and more likely only several thousand years ago.
See:
Earth In Upheaval, Velikovsky, "Tiahuanacu in the Andes" pp 81-87

nick c