Soft Granite?

Cusco in Peru has some curious polygonal masonry architecture. I am intrigued by these huge blocks of granite. They often weigh many tons each and no two blocks are exactly the same. They are irregular in shape and size yet they are joined together so perfect that not even a piece of paper would fit in between them and no mortar is needed to hold them in place. Some of them are arranged in neat rows yet others seem to have been roughly thrown together with little regard to surface finish or accuracy... accept for in the joints between them!

Granite is a 7 on the Mohs hardness scale of 10. 10 being diamond. So it's a hard rock indeed! According to mainstream archeology these ​​rocks were shaped and assembled by the Inka who had at their disposal copper and bronze tools... which would be like trying to cut trees with a hard rubber knife. 

The rocks don't look like they were shaped with chisels and hammers... To me they look more like they have been soft and malleable at some point. Especially in areas where the walls have been damaged (image on the right) and the joint surfaces are exposed. The stones have a sort of "lip" on their edge where they would have joined up with other rocks. It looks as though they were soft like putty at the time of placement. Their weight would have squished them together and formed perfect joints between them. That would also explain the bulging pillow shape. Why would you go through the trouble of carving something like that with bronze tools as we are told the Inka supposedly did?

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These megalithic granite walls are always the foundation underneath what looks like crude Inka construction and repairs on top. So they must be older. It looks more like the Inka did not build these structures but inherited them from an unknown civilization that was able to shape these stones in ways that we don't yet understand. It looks like the builders of these walls used this method of construction because it was the easiest method for them. The Inka used mortar and loose rocks and fragments of the megalithic buildings to fix and rebuild the structures they found. 

Above Cusco lies Sacsaywaman with even more impressive architecture. Here the megaliths that make up the walls can weigh up to 100 tons... yet they still have been assembled with perfect precision in the joints. It looks like the same construction method. I even see indentations in the surfaces of the rocks that - to me - look like someone prodded the rocks into place while they were still malleable. I would not even be surprised if this was not a long construction but rather something that was quickly thrown together for some purely practical purpose. 

Things start to become really curious when taking a closer look at the pyramids in Egypt. On the third pyramid of Giza there are some of the original granite casing stones left in place... and they exibit similar features as the walls found in Cusco!

On this wall it looks like the builders were capable of quickly putting stones into place that conform to what ever surface was underneath and then going over them to achieve a smooth surface finish on the outside as seen around the portal that leads inside the pyramid. The pillow shaped surfaces here are flattened as if someone went over them with a big rolling pin. How could this same type of construction exist in Egypt and Peru at a time where these two cultures supposedly did not yet know of each others existence?

Unfortunately the site has been quarried heavily over the past centuries and most of the original casing stones of the pyramids can now be found in the walls of buildings in Cairo but these casing stones that are still in their original place show the exact same method of construction as the ones found in Peru. Granite, perfect joints... and what are those curious nobs? 

So... perhaps who ever built these walls knew how to make a type of granite concrete? Probably not because there are more examples of granite being malleable in quarries.

This is the unfinished obelisk in the Aswan quarry in Egypt. It has an estimated weight of 1200 tons. It is still attached to the bedrock so it is a work in progress piece that can provide insights into how these things were actually cut out. 

Bronze and copper tools and chisels? It looks more like someone with an over sized ice cream scoop started scooping away at the granite as if it were butter. I think what's missing here is perspective. We try to explain what we observe with the certainty that previous civilizations were more primitive the further back in time we go. What if civilization was merely reset by a cataclysmic event such as the younger dryas period? And what if they had technologies for cutting and forming stone that differ vastly from the methods we use today? We try to explain what we see through the lens of our current understanding and state of technology. But could there be other paths of technological evolution that result in methods that don't rely on heavy machinery and mechanical leverage? Methods that are lost to us today?