Gobleki Teppe Redux

[Minimalist]

Here is a man who is a prisoner of his own outlook.

http://www.balkantravellers.com/en/read/article/1029

I am standing amidst evidence that could upset everything we know about our remote past. Imagine such an age that it is still thousands of years to the discovery of metal and that the best cutting tool available is made of a piece of flintstone, with which you will hack 25-ton obelisks out of the bedrock and, carving those frightful animal figures on them, drag them here and erect them.

There is no indication that this author actually picked up a piece of flint and tried to scratch a piece of that bedrock. I'm not sure what this reluctance is among archaeologists to do experiments but he simply assumes that everything he has been told about the Mesolithic era is correct and therefore is amazed that these structures could have been built.

He does not seem to ask himself the question; "what if we are wrong?"

[E.P. Grondine]

I wonder if the pictoglyphs reflect astronomical constellations?

While this structure is dated 9,000 BCE, you have to remember the massive impacts which occurred ca 10,900 BCE. Perhaps the whole structure is meant simply as something to magically keep the heavens in place. Or at least to pass on astronomical knowledge.

Other possibilities are a ritual structure to impose rule over nomadic or migratory peoples (meeting and agreeing who stays where), or perhaps some kind of center for dealing with disease.

Finally, while the excavators suggest that the rings were buried, perhaps what happened was that ritual burial complexes were built and buried - we do have the burial chambers on Malta to compare them with.

The pictoglyphs could still be astronomical constellations, perhaps reflected as clan signs. Suppose you have clans which are held in common by nomadic groups, who meet at pre-determined times of the year, to bury their dead, exchange goods, inter-marry, etc.

One might think that the T stela's at this site were used to support beams, but without visiting the site itself it is tough to work from pictures.

In any case the structure represents a significant investment of labor, so the question is "For what purpose?"

I also wonder whether or not the megaliths were painted as well as inscribed. I hope the excavators are checking for pigments on the stela.

While the monuments on Malta (which appear to be descendant) have limited astronomical alignments, the construction of Stonehenge 1 seems to have been prompted by the appearance of Comet Encke and the impact of some of its fragments ca. 3,114 BCE and Stonehenge 2 by the impacts ca 2,360 BCE.

Note especially that all of the people living on Malta "disappear" ca 2,360 BCE. That's "all", and "disappear".

Ancient megalithic stone working technologies are still pretty mysterious.
I am sure that work on the quarry there is going to throw a lot of light on them.

In closing, given the size of this structure it seems likely to me that there were smaller earlier antecedents. We're not hearing much about the lithics, whether serated or polished, and source quarries for them.

[Minimalist]

So...just for the hell of it...I took a piece of flint that I had picked up while visiting Charlie in Texas and selected a garden variety quartz rock out of my 'garden.'

The flint scratched the rock. The point of the flint also crumbled a little. Now both of these, as I have since found out, have hardness factors of 7 on the Mohs scale but it seems to me that unless these rock structures are carved out of very soft rock that flint would be a terribly inefficient way to carve them. You'd spend most of your time putting an edge back on the flint.

In any case the structure represents a significant investment of labor, so the question is "For what purpose?"

Certainly a fair question, E.P. I, among others, do not think that our ancestors were stupid or that they did things for no reason.
To invest that much labor out of a subsistence economy must have served some purpose that they considered very important.

[E.P. Grondine]

So...just for the hell of it...I took a piece of flint that I had picked up while visiting Charlie in Texas and selected a garden variety quartz rock out of my 'garden.'

The flint scratched the rock. The point of the flint also crumbled a little. Now both of these, as I have since found out, have hardness factors of 7 on the Mohs scale but it seems to me that unless these rock structures are carved out of very soft rock that flint would be a terribly inefficient way to carve them. You'd spend most of your time putting an edge back on the flint.

An exercise in futility, Min. You don't know the specific rock types.

Consider some alternatives:
1) apply salt water. let dry. salt crystals fracture rock
2) apply some kind of acid
3) Find a natural lens and heat
4) hammer stones suspended at the end of ropes and swung

The only way this one is going to be cleared up is by excavation.

The quarry itself is an extremely interesting site which could be worked by another team at the same time the main site is worked.

The repeated building of succeding structures is going to make excavation of the main site difficult.

[Minimalist]

Agreed, but the author of the original piece was the one who suggested that flint was the best available cutting tool.

Egyptologists suggest that copper saws sans teeth were used to cut granite blocks out of quarries. I'm used to this.

[E.P. Grondine]

Agreed, but the author of the original piece was the one who suggested that flint was the best available cutting tool.

Egyptologists suggest that copper saws sans teeth were used to cut granite blocks out of quarries. I'm used to this.

One skilled engineer pointed out to me that that doesn't work, as by his estimate the rate of copper wear exceeds the copper supply several times over.

(Perhaps that's where some of the Michigan copper went - If anyone wants to pick up the expedition costs, there's a place on the outer banks of the Carolinas which I've been told of at powwow and which I'd like to visit.
Here in Illinois it's in the 20's, the wind is howling, and so I have tons of time to peck out this message for your enlightenment.)

I suspect that the Egyptian solution may not be anything more exotic than simply greatly enlarged simple tools in use for wood working with some additional tech, or perhaps a chemical reaction of some kind, or perhaps something using lenses.

To my mind, very early Egyptian quarry technology was related to that of Malta, which in turn had its antecedents at this site.

The quarry there in Turkey could be excavated by an entirely separate division of this project, while the main division continues work on the main site. It's a question that the director of the excavations is going to have to work on.

I'm sure someone at Chicago's Oriental Institute is kicking themselves for missing this one in their field survey.

[Minimalist]

The example I saw...and they were actually demonstrating it, involved two-man copper "saws" but they had no teeth. Instead, sand was used as the grinding agent. The theory was that if you kept pouring sand into the scratch created by the "saw" that the sand would eventually cut through the granite.

They were doing this in a virtual lab setting with the granite block up on saw horses (and thus accessible from all sides.) They had made a minor impression and it looked as if it would take forever to cut through the block.

Meanwhile, anyone who has ever used a saw knows that the friction builds up heat which causes the saw to expand and bind unless it is kept well oiled. They did not address this issue at all. Pouring water or vegetable oil in would seem, to me, to impede the grinding action of the sand but they weren't close to being deep enough into the rock to have to worry about that problem.

I'm not familiar with Malta but I have seen demonstrations of how marble was quarried in Italy, with wooden wedges being soaked so they expanded and so forth. Some variant of that would be fine to explain how they broke the granite out of the quarry but the fact remains that they then had to finish these granite blocks, which were used for the walls and ceilings of the King's Chamber and such, to highly specific tolerances. A credit card cannot be inserted into the joints of these stones. Again, it is the Egyptologists themselves who maintain that the pyramid was built with copper chisels, dolomite hammers, wooden sleds and ropes.
They have examples of the tools. I simply do not believe that the work could have been accomplished in 20 years or less.

Call me stubborn.

[E.P. Grondine]

All of these years Min, and still no definitive answers. This lack of hard answers allows a lot of bs to be spun and sold - everything from aliens to advanced races.

I suspect that the answers will be found in the workers quarters, which have never been one of the excavation goals, or perhaps in the engineers' tombs.

So much for the "how"s

The "why"s most likely involve comet fragment impacts.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas

[Minimalist]

or perhaps in the engineers' tombs.

One of the most amusing things I ever saw on one of these specials was Zahi Hawass himself standing by an inscription of the man who, he said, was the construction boss for the pyramid project. The inscription gave his titles and such.

Meanwhile, the alleged tomb of the supposed pharaoh who ordered the thing to be built in the first place had no more ornamentation than your average utility conduit. The Egyptologists' explanation for burying such a powerful king that way?

"Style."