We've been told by archeologists that the myriad of ancient stone megaliths scattered around the world were constructed, at great expense of manpower and time, to mark the trajectory of the sun. So that prehistoric man would know when to sow and reap. Celebrate their sundry religious events etc. My question is; why did they go through all of that when the same results can be obtained simply by aligning pebbles or small rocks on a flat surface, in a fixed position?
While archaeologists can definitively say that many of these monuments are aligned with the sun (or sometimes other celestial bodies), I don't think any claim this would simply be about managing seasons for farming (which I suspect would tend to be based more on the weather that the exact time of year). Nobody knows exactly why all the time and effort was put in to these monuments (and no decent professional archaeologist or historian would claim to know). There are plenty of ideas, a popular one being spiritual/religious significance, similar to the reason later societies built grand Cathedrals even though you could just as easily pray to God in a simple wooden shack.
They probably had surplus labour, so they used it to build these things. Which probably had some use that pebbles could not have. For example pebbles would not keep their shape from one year to another.
How long would a pile of pebbles or small rocks last? It would probably only last until some acolyte trips on them and sends them all over place. With the megaliths, they have lasted centuries. Nothing short of an earthquake could have knocked them over. Also, the community would have wanted to impress neighboring tribes with their awesomeness.
The neighboring tribes probably thought that those fools building those megaliths were nuts. While they were toiling and using their limited resources dragging giant stones around, the neighboring tribes were developing weapons and agriculture and planning to take over those megaliths, once the fools completed them.
A) For something as vitally important as astronomy was for early people, arrangements of small pebbles or rocks would have been much too easy to disturb. It's hard to disturb multi-ton blocks of stone, and they really didn't need their solar calendars becoming unaligned over generations. B) Religion isn't always sensible. Why did Christians build cathedrals? Glorification of god, etc. Maybe they had similar motivations. C) Boredom; they had vast stretches of the year with pretty much nothing to do. This would have created social unrest, so early social planners set people to incredibly labor intensive and marginally useful tasks in order to keep them busy. Perhaps they also used the labor spent constructing these features as an excuse to provide welfare. D) Because they wanted to leave a lasting statement for the ages. Plenty of societies have done crazy feats of engineering for no other reason than to leave a monument or show other societies how badass they were. E) Maybe it wasn't very difficult. This is something that I think a lot of people overlook. For societies that regularly engaged in megalithic construction, it might not have been very hard at all for them to do this. We keep talking about exacting accuracy, and how people today can't do that, with the assumption being that today's engineers--almost none of whom have actually built a structure using megaliths--ought to know best how to do it. If their societies did this sort of thing on a semi-regular basis, then they no doubt had plenty of skilled craftsmen with experience constructing megalithic structures, and it might simply not have been a tremendous problem for them.
This seems like the sort of project a society does when they're dominant enough to have client tribes providing supplies to them in tribute.
They're not megaliths, they're fortresses. Or somebody's house. My mother never bought a house unless the sun came into the garden at the right angle and it came through the living room window in the morning. In Peru though, there are all kinds of huge drawings about the place, said to be related to the seasons and such. But people still make those huge drawings on the side of mountains to advertise things like Inca Cola, or the local masonic lodge.
So you think that the Nazca lines were put there by some Inca Ad Agency? Not much of an ad campaign...they can only be seen from high above. I doubt that they were all that effective. I was pretty picky about where the sun traversed when I bought my house too.
High up in the Andes a buncha pig squatters are destroying the Nazca figures... Squatters raise pigs on Nazca lines site, destroy cemetery Fri, Aug 17, 2012 - Squatters have started raising pigs on the site of Perus Nazca lines the giant designs best seen from an airplane that were mysteriously etched into the desert more than 1,500 years ago. The squatters have destroyed a Nazca-era cemetery and the 50 shacks they have built border Nazca figures, a Peruvian Culture Ministry director Blanca Alva said.
For the same reason that you listen to music that everybody else is listening to at a party instead of your iPod. It's social and builds community.
Maybe it was a WPA-type project to lower unemployment? What would all of those thousands of workers be doing if they didn't spend their entire lives constructing any given monument? They're kind of like Graceland in the sense that the original builders did not know they were creating an income-stream for many generations. I give them much more credit than modern man because they created stuff that took every ounce of their beings, their entire lives, leaving behind monuments that can be enjoyed and pondered for a few more centuries. I wish we had a few of them in the USA...except we would probably bulldoze them and build new ones out of metal and glass with a restaurant and gift shop...and a penthouse for $20 mil...
Not really. In fact, most evidence seems to point very much in the other way. In general, more primtive peoples were normally quite impressed with megastructures. Even the Greeks and Romans were impressed with what was done in Ancient Egypt. And in fact, it appears that the structures of Stonehenge was quite famous throughout Europe. Evidence on the Amesbury Archerer indicates that he had traveled from Central Europe to Stonehenge, most likely because of the healing powers. And while Stonehenge is among the most well known of ancient monoliths and impressive stone movements, it is certainly not the only one. The Western Stone, part of the Temple in Jerusalem weighs in at 517 tons, and it's movement still puzzles archaeologists. And there have been similar structures built throughout Europe, but most are long destroyed or buried. The Merchant's Table in France was likely a similar structure, one of the stones before being broken weighed in at over 280 tons, built around 4700 BCE. And in other areas of the world there are massive stones that were moved much later, but still by cultures who were only at a neolithic state of development. Like the Moai of Easter Island (887 statues, weighing up to 86 tons). Or even some cultures that did massive projects without stones at all, like the Mound Builders. They built gigantic hills with nothing but dirt transported in baskets, often rising 50-100 feet, and covering areas of thousands of square meters..
I can imagine a Pharaoh sitting on his view-deck and shouting 'hill over there and lake over here' then a couple of decades later saying 'lake over there and hill over here' while a zillion workers scramble to satisfy his wishes. Do you know if someone has x-ray(ed) the jungles of South America and the sand dunes of Northern Africa to understand what is hidden below?
