I’ve never seen a rock stacked on another rock that DID allow a piece of paper to be slipped between them.
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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Cyclopean walls (haphazard stacks of boulders) are what most Europeans think of as "stone walls" so ones that aren't just loose piles of rocks are pretty impressive by that standard.
The coolest part is really that they're so complexly fitted without mortar - which allows for stone constructions to survive in an earthquake prone region. The stones can slip past each other without losing their place relative to each other when jostled, which is why Incan stoneworks like this are still standing when all the stuff the ~~murdering bastards~~ Spaniards built have long since collapsed.
Have you seen a rock that weighed over 100 tons sit on another rock and not have space for a piece of paper along its full length?
As long as both rocks are relatively flat on the connected faces, in most cases no. A piece of paper is, what, 8 inches wide on its second shortest axis? For two "relatively" flat pieces of rock, your going to have multiple places where a small segment juts out. Those are the segments that will support all the weight of the rock, and a heavier rock will have more/thicker supporting segments. Both of those factors combined, especially on rocks as heavy as these, would lead me to expect not being able to stick a fairly large piece of paper between them. Something much thinner, like a sticky note, would be significanly easier to fit through those gaps. But a standard piece of notebook paper would not be able to fit through the gaps on my window hinges, and they are by no means sealed.
Dont bring logic into this discussion about alien space lasers.
What about beside them? To the adjacent set of stacked rocks.
Saw a documentary on the construction technique a while back. It's not as hard as it seams, but it is a shit ton of work. I'm not sure who worked harder, the guy chiseling on a rock all day every day, or the people feeding that guy that just chisels on a rock all damn day.
It's not as hard as it seams [...]
I see what you did there.
A lot of things are possible when you have a population that is deeply socialized to believe completely in the cause, and/or has few viable economic options, and/or is literally compelled to do the work. We also have a lot of survivorship bias as the we only see the stuff that was done so well as to stand the test of time. In the early days of Egyptology for example, they would sometimes realize (or learn from the locals because the locals knew best) that the big heap of rubble over there in the desert was actually a pyramid where somebody half-assed it with mud bricks instead of the giant limestone slabs from Giza.
One theory is that the final step was that they mixed acid mine drainage with mud and applied that before setting the rock in place. This "dissolved" the minute bumps resulting in a perfect fit.
"Sacks-uh-wha-man" is pretty close, iirc it's originally an aymara name so it's a little "borderline impossible" to get the pronunciation 100% right if you're not a native speaker. Beautiful place, but nobody ever, EVER talks about the fucking slides and it drives me nuts.
I'd like to hear more about the fucking slides, if you're opening to telling me about them. They sound interesting.
They get dismissed as a natural rock formation and somehow people claim that only in modern times have people considered them slides and it drives me nuts. They're so obviously slides, the biggest ones have been worn smooth by centuries of asses going down them (a geologist I met while down there was working on proving it was centuries of asses that had polished them), any child ever will go "fuck yeah I'm gonna go slide down that", and yet people constantly either ignore or dismiss them. Just argh.
Yes. I want to know about the slides. I hope this isn't like some super secret and the second they brought it up they were disappeared.
The slides are just ignored, the real super secret is all the tunnels at the site (the lizardpeople made them)
Easy! Just lay the first one. Measure the contour. Get your chisel out and start chiseling. Dry fit, chisel some more. Repeat a thousand times. Move on to the next rock. Once done for the first rock just repeat for the next rock layer. Except this time you gotta fit two sides, then lift the rock and dry fit again until it fits. Try non undercuts.
Seriously, I think a good way to do it is to have many men stand on the rock over sharp sands and just wiggle the rock until it grinds the rocks below and itself onto no motion at all.
I wonder if the odd earthquake, over time, grinds the mismatched surfaces a bit too.
I assume its only the hardest of granites. LOL.