One Quart, Resealable, Plastic Bag: Temporarily tethered to the suburbs, two adventure junkies travel the world in pursuit of the planet's nicest people.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
For the Engineers
So this image of Cuzco's 12 angle stone is for the engineer in all of us (but mostly for WCC and Casey). The stones are traditional Inca polygonal masonry, featuring blocks of irregular shape and surprisingly, they are constructed without mortar or the benefit of the wheel. Extraordinary manpower was the secret to this construction technique and it is said that during earthquakes (of which there are plenty here) these seismically stable stones "danced" in place! (Hopefully not to the sound of the pan flute - if I hear that sound one more time I'm going to freak). If Casey or WCC had been here for the shot, I suspect we would have spent way more time analyzing the definition of an "angle". Apologies for cutting off a bit of the photo but a flurry of other tourists were jockeying to shoot their own images.
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5 comments:
Indeed, a very interesting 12-edge 1080-degree polygon structure. Since all the stones seem to have been cut to have straight edges, I wonder if they made that stone there as the last puzzle piece to fill the empty spot. Now it leaves us to wonder why they left such a hole in the wall. Perhaps it served as a shortcut to avoid going around the wall during the construction, to pass tools, or smaller stones through? Or maybe it was really a hole in the wall for lunch?
My vote is for a lunch hole. I'll bet this wall is standing long after that earthquake-proof skyscraper in Mexico City is gone.
Incans would have been killer Tetris players...
Maybe the wall is not really composed of individual stones. The Incans were crafty and probably made the wall out of paper mache, forming what appeared to be stones and then applying some stone-looking surface texture to make it look complicated and very difficult to build.
Underneath the elegant paper mache wall is probably the real wall made of mounds of rubble and trash.
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