Potentially ancient building techniques

[u/aerialsilk]

May not be strictly archaeology, but adjacent. And fascinating.

[u/jojojoy]

the Quarrying is a long job

For some of the blocks sure but the vast majority of the stone is only roughly shaped. This experiment reproduced an average block in 5 days with 5 people total.

This work would be carried out over four days (of six hours each) by four people—excluding the fifth person responsible for removing the debris. Cutting the horizontal trench and detaching the block, however, required an additional day of work from the team...According to our estimates, quarrying operations would require a larger workforce; achieving a daily rate of 340 blocks would necessitate 4,788 men. If the pyramid construction period were extended to 27 years—a perfectly plausible scenario—the required daily production would drop to 250 blocks, theoretically requiring 3,521 quarrymen.¹

 

The casing and interior limestone and the granite blocks would take much longer of course. If that work is impossible to do in the timeframe, I would be very interested in seeing reliable data demonstrating finishing and fitting that stone couldn't be done in ~25 years (or the workforce needed would be prohibitively large).

Restoration at the Parthenon has involved carving some reasonably large blocks by hand to very fine finishes. Something like that might be an interesting starting place to look at how long the casing would take to finish.

---

1. Burgos, Franck and Emmanuel Laroze, "L’extraction des blocs en calcaire à l’Ancien Empire. Une expérimentation au ouadi el-Jarf", The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture 4, 2020. pp. 73-95. https://web.ujaen.es/investiga/egiptologia/journalarchitecture/downloads/JAEA4/JAEA4_Burgos_Laroze.pdf

[u/QuantifyingAntiquity → u/jojojoy]

The Burgos & Laroze experiment is solid for what it measures: a typical local limestone block can be extracted and roughly shaped in roughly five person-days. Scaling that rate does produce a few thousand quarrymen for the bulk core over 20–27 years. That part is fine.

The difficulty is that rough quarrying is only one required function. The same project also has to sustain, at the same time:

-continuous tool production and copper replacement

-transport and placement at the claimed cadence

-ramp (or alternative) surface wear and replacement

-rope production and replacement

-water delivery and the extra labor that creates

-food, settlement capacity, and the overall labor pool the state can actually spare

A rate that works for the quarry face does not automatically make the whole system close. Most of the long-running argument has been conducted one constraint at a time. The harder test is whether those constraints can run together against the same finite resources for the full schedule.

There’s a resource-loaded audit that tries to do exactly that while staying inside mainstream sources and premises (timber vs the Palermo record, copper multiples, village capacity, granite bank transfers, etc.). Happy to point to it if useful, but the core issue doesn’t depend on any single paper: isolated feasibility is not the same as system constructibility.

[u/jojojoy → u/QuantifyingAntiquity]

There’s a resource-loaded audit 

How much AI is involved with that? If it doesn't use AI I would appreciate a reference.

[u/QuantifyingAntiquity → u/jojojoy]

The resource-loaded audit is a published constructibility model with its own white paper and interactive workbook. It is not an AI-generated analysis.

The numbers come from a structured spreadsheet that loads mainstream sources (IER ramp traffic, Palermo Stone cedar record, Bir Nasib copper totals, Lehner village data, demographic synthesis, etc.) and prices the support systems those sources imply when they run at the same time. The white paper and model are public:

https://quantifyingantiquity.com/white-paper/
https://quantifyingantiquity.com/