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Stonehenge

Stone Shifting 2

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He he he. One thing you ain't is a good little chippie!

I’ve been thinking some more about methods (I have leisure –can’t mow the lawn as it’s full of holes!)…

If there are several methods of raising stones, how can you hit on the one that’s going to seem most persuasive to archaeologists?

I think it needs to be one that incorporates two elements.
First, it should have some element of “hauling up” (it just looks like the simplest approach, and most monoliths, being irregular, would have been dealt with that way, as Mike Pitts is planning to demonstrate at Avebury).
Second, it should involve as few people as possible (on the grounds that it’s good sense to assume that if the ancients had several options they’d have chosen the most efficient. That neatly disposes of the archaeo-speculation about whether it was 50 or 250 people. Either way, they’d have gone for efficiency so your main idea would be vindicated).

So how about going for a hybrid solution? You hinted you were thinking a bit that way yourself. The BBC got the stone to 70 degrees, then hauled it up using hundreds of people. How about if we use your method to get it to, say, 85% degrees (or thereabouts - it wouldn't matter) then haul it up using just our small number of people?
Steve could use the computer model to determine what exact angle would be optimum for our particular workforce, and we’d have a system that was a lot more robust and bug-free, and we could get away with a lower tower. We might even avoid having to construct a second A frame for the hauling up process.

Who could argue that that it wasn’t the most efficient, and therefore most likely method? And of course, it would make a great show, as the same small team would have first rowed the stone to where it was needed.

There is another way to get a stone up to vertical even from the horizontal and that is to use wedges and props. For our purposes, let's assume that the stone is already at some angle from the vertical. You place two layers of timber against the stone and then put in props from the ground to support the timbers. You then drive wedges from the top between the two layers of timber, forcing them apart and raising the stone a little. Follow the small wedges with bigger ones until the wedges are too big to be handled comfortably. Place more props between the original ones to support the stone and then remove the wedges. Replace the original props with longer ones closing the gap between the timbers. Start again driving in wedges. Repeat the whole process until the stone is upright. I believe (though I have no direct evidence) that this is the only method that the ancient Egyptians could have used to erect the 1100 ton unfinished obelisk at Aswan.

Why are we thinking about getting less than 90 degree just to please the Archaeologists? The're not going to like this jumped up little chippie anyway. Get it as near 90 degrees as we can and I'll headbutt it 'til its right.