The Gate of the Sun, also known as the Gateway of the Sun, is a monolith carved in the form of an arch or gateway at the site of Tiahuanaco by the Tiwanaku culture, an Andean civilization of Bolivia that thrived around Lake Titicaca in the Andes of western South America around 500-950 CE.
Extract from Wikipedia
How was such a monument made in those times?
What technology did they use to cut the single stone from which the Sun Gate was curved?
My wife and I spent a few years in South America and some of the really old stone work was incredible. The more recent stonework dating back centuries was clearly cruder in nature and of a completely different style but the oddball pieces that were generally just standing apart from the rest of these structures was truly impressive. As a retired commercial builder with dozens of large projects under my belt, I don't think I could find tradespeople capable of reproducing any of this work, with conventional, modern tools.
@ChrisAine That was the odd bit, they didn't look like they were a cut and polish job but rather just precision cut and we don't have the ability to cut rounded corners like that with saws, even lasers which could cut those corners would have left pitting. It's more like the stones were cut with a variation on a CNC machine but one that could work with large blocks of basalt and other stones on that hardness scale.
I used to worry about all these things years ago and got carried away with book writers that all talked outer space people. Well, that was years ago.
At the very least, the aliens helped view, belittles humans and what they can acheive.
@ChrisAine Perhaps with the most basic and simple of tools, lots and lots of people and lots and lots of time. You can wear down the biggest rock just by rubbing away endlessly, and if they were a seasonal farming economy, then they probably had long periods where they had thousands of people with nothing to do, and it was actually a problem for the govenments to find things for them to do.
I wonder if the Germans plagerised this design when they built the Berlin gate??? Not identical but take into account the 25% variation of copy right law, Hmmm I wonder.
Magnificent now, what would it have been like in its heyday?