Stonework of the Americas

share their ancient craft

Other urls found in this thread:

ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/unravelling-mystery-behind-megalithic-stone-walls-saksaywaman-001470
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuelap
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Chico_civilization
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moche_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwanaku
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimu_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chachapoya_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choquequirao
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raqch'i
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Chan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikillaqta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Inca stone

what did he mean by this?

The maya made nice cities of stone

Not a building but still amazing

Mayan

What a loss

Willy Wonkamec and the Human Sacrifice Factory

could you share more if you have any

Machu Picchu

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On the Winter Solstice at the Mayan Temple El Castillo at Chichen Itza the shadow from the sun creates the effect of a snake sneaking down the steps of the temple

Why did aztecs produce so little compared to Incans and Mayans?

Busy having their cities renovated by Spics.

unfortunately i believe they destroyed pic related

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so how did they fit those stones together

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that's the question isn't it

ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/unravelling-mystery-behind-megalithic-stone-walls-saksaywaman-001470

interesting

didn't they use this as target practice?

The productive stage of their civilisation was much shorter, having only really lasted less than a century before the Spanish brought about the apocalypse. Even so, Tenochtitlan was a marvel of a city that arguably surpassed anything the Maya or Inca built.

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M8y Rome took hundreds of years to reach the populations Tenochtitlan hit with foot labor, 100 years and perpetual warfare.

their main city was leveled by cortes, temples destroyed etc. but the aztecs were great stonemasons

It was extremely painf- er, difficult. Basically, you get a small rock, then pound on the surface of the big rock, gradually flaking off protrusions and smoothing the surface. It could take hundreds of man-hours for each stone.

The inca walls look so smooth

Man im gonna use this to make a texture its so comfy

comfy as hell!

>No one makes buildings out of stone anymore
>All the buildings you've ever called home will be dust and dirt within the next 2 centuries.
>Our descendants will never praise our society's wisdom to make lasting monuments to our own ingenuity.
Feels bad man.

wtf is that???

this not aliens. Lack of mortar made it only viable option for long long lasting buildings. Look 700ish years without use and still up. Your house today couldn't last that long

Kuelap, the walled city of the Chachapoyas (cloud people)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuelap

Attempting to revive a dying thread.
What's your favorite mesoamerican or andean culture?
Here are some interesting andean ones:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Chico_civilization
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moche_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwanaku
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimu_culture
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Empire
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chachapoya_culture

>nobody will ever figure out what the hell the Norte Chino were

>The people from the Norte-Chico civilization used vertebrae of the blue whale as stools
How the living fuck does a civilization dating around 3200BC manage to not only kill a blue whale, but also drag its carcass home to make furniture?

Suddenly this ancient aliens thing doesn't seem so crazy.

This shit is so cool. I don't have anything to contribute except awe

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norte_Chico_civilization
Interesting sadly most of south america is largely ignored

>If only more of the spics in the US were peruvian instead of mexican stuff like this wouldn't be so obscure

If there were more peruvians than mexicans in the US at least I could go out to eat a good ceviche, lomo, or a chicharron sandwich rather than having my pick of food being 20 different fast food brands of the same burger or some bland taco/burrito.

What are your favorite andean ruins Veeky Forums?
Y'all should check out some of the ruins from those cultures.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choquequirao
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raqch'i
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chan_Chan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikillaqta
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuelap
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral


Out of these Caral, Kuelap, and Choquequirao are probably the most interesting and lesser known (though chan chan is just as interesting but is already popular). I think someone already mentioned Kuelap earlier in the thread.

>kill a blue whale
They probably used the carcasses that washed up the shore. That's what the Nantucket Indians did.

Where is this now?

srs question: how do you level a stone city with technology of that era?

>what are beached whales

>expected a thread on Masonic traditions in America
>got thread on literal stonework of the Americas
Just as good.

So this is what Lovecraft meant by cyclopean...

Damn you simple logic, must you ruin everything?

Blue whale beachings are so rare that it seems the odds would be against it, but then again, one would be enough to give you several houses full of chairs, and there were probably a lot more of them back then.

The same way you built it, patience + manpower, but with less need for planning.

Damn All Tomorrows - can't look at that without thinking of the carpet people.

(Long story short, uber-aliens turned a human colony into carpet people for vengeful shiggles.)

Cortes had cannons and guns

Eat your heart out, Antonio Gaudí.

Heh, I never noticed the similarity.

>A fucking monolith

Aliens confirmed

to add to what user said, the spanish even used trebutchets to siege the place

reminds me of the stone that was used to represent makuta in bionicle

And rome wasn't in perpetual warfare?

Wow, all of this stuff is so beautiful and intriguing.

Thank you, Christianity, for killing off dozens if not hundreds of cultures, both in the west, allowing us to never meet or learn from them, and replacing them with an extremely repressed and xenophobic faith and lifestyle.

Surely, the world is so much better with you in it.

>1521
>Still using Trebuchets
WEW LAD

according to diaz del castillo and cortes

Pretty cool

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So basically their society wasted centuries chipping rocks to build homes instead of actually doing science and shit.

>using the extremely limited stores of gunpowder to crack a wall
>throwing a rock you found with a machine any carpenter can build
choose one

There is evidence for Mesolithic Europeans that went whaling in dugout canoes.

Come to think about it inuit do the same thing don't they?

They don't drag the carcass home.

Not that it isn't fucking impressive... Wish I had a link to the video that shows what happens when they fuck it up though. ...Sperm whales eating eskimos - RL Moby Dick nightmare fuel.

There was no middle east to learn science from

Amazing view from the top of Pyramid of the sun in Teotihuacan with people climbing

unf

That's a wall in the city of Cuzco actually, commonly known as the wall of the cougar

>can you spot it?

I spent like 3 hours making an image comparing Tenochtitlan back in the day to mexico city now to show how much of a travesty it is that it was leveled but I mixed up Montezuma's palace with the tlatelolco marketplace and it was impossible to fix the image and make a proper comparsion by that point so here's just what I could fix and salvage of the "before" half

I can post the source images upon request

Are you fucking serious? Tenochtitlan was the 5th or 6th most populated city in the world when the Spainish arrived. Literally every conquistador account remarks that the city was stupendously magnificent. It had some of the most advanced hydro-engineering in the world at the time, not to mention all the other cities nearby that were also built on the same series of lakes that were all interconnected with causeways

And they were all built essentially without metal tools or any sort of work/pack animal for transporting supplies or manual labor.

They had math and astronomy and shit too you cuck, how do you think they calculated the amount of stone they needed and made sure everything wouldn't collapse in on itself?

Pic related is a land survey from Texoco, which was one of the founding city states of the Aztec empire alongside Tenochtitlan and Tlacopan

Not saying aztecs were useless fucks, just that mayans did it all better a thousand years before.

The mayans had cool shit but nothing they did compares to Tenochtitlan IMO

Mayans had math, science and writing, though, that beats any citadel.

The aztecs had all of that as well though?

I wonder who they learned that from.

what are some essential Lovecraft cyclopeancore?

Not from the mayans, since the aztecs came from northen mexico, whereas the mayans origjinated and stayed in very southeast mexico/guatamala

Civilization in central America predates both the Aztecs and the Maya.

>boo hoo no more sacrificing people to appease the snake god stupid christards ruin everything!

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No shit, but my point is that i'm saying that it's more like the aztecs were greeks and the mayans were egyptians, whereas he's implying it's more like mayans were sumer and aztecs were babylonians

Shows how much you know, quetzacoatl didn't have human sacrifices in his name, that was mainly xipe totec and huitzilopochtli

Without the internet and time to shitpost I guess we get plenty productive.

>No, they didn't carve out hearts here they did it over there.
>Therefor you're wrong
>Aztecs dindu nuffin
t. jose de la taco

It's almost like the stone was soft and then hardened. Really weird.

>tfw you realize they also carved the mountain next to machu picchu

They were fairly advanced.

he's right though. Just before the Spaniards arrived there was a growing cult of Quetzalcoatl which didn't require sacrifices, of course the Aztec ruling class (Huitzilopotzli followers) wanted to shut it down.

t. jose de la quesadilla

Nobody is saying that Aztec religion didn't have an usually large focus on human sacrifice relative to others, i'm just calling you out on being wrong that they did it to Quetzalcoatl.

That said, the aztecs didn't really kill more people then most european nations did at the time for equally shitty reasons.

I'm gonna bump this thread because it's interesting.

The reason is the Aztec cities were populated at the time of the Spanish invasion. During the early colonial period these cities were often occupied by the Conquistadors and a lot of the old buildings were destroyed and rebuilt into colonial syle buildings using the same stones and building materials of the precolumbian structures. There are smaller cities with ruins of the Aztecs like Malinalco, but most were destroyed. This is also why many Maya cities from the same period didn't really survive apart from some like Iximche which was burned down before it could be leveled and rebuilt into a colonial town. And also Chiutnamit. Cities like Copan. Tikal, Calakmul, Bonampak, Palenque, Chichen Itza, Uxmal etc all date from much earlier periods and were already abandoned by the time of the Spanish arrival. So the Spaniards didn't touch these cities much since they were buried in mounds or ruins.

the ruins of Chan Chan in Trujillo, Peru.
Adobe, not stone

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Are there reconstructions of what Chan Chan would have looked like in its heyday?

Inca built with candy

It's the other way around, really. They'd typically pre-select the stones that would fit 'best', lay them out, and cut them perfectly on the ground. They didn't use mortar so each stone had to be cut to an autistic savant exactness. There was no plaster finish/etc that we know of though so the stones were stacked with a nice flatness to them. However, over time the rains would accumulate at the indentations as the fell and 'slope' the outer face of the stones as they dripped down to the ground.

>not saying anyone should ever do this
>but i bet if you took out some of those stones the inside edges and surfaces would be near perfectly flat

Flesh carpets sounds way cooler than the carpet story I read. The carpets in that one were just made of hair, and were unknowingly created over decades by a multitude of planets and billions of humans so they could be shipped to a planet that was being covered in these human-hair carpets. There's only one guy on the hair-carpet planet hooked up to a life support system that has lasted thousands of years. All this set in motion by a space emperor who was super-sensitive about his baldness. The dude in the life-support system made a comment about hair that the emperor didn't like.