Exceptionaly well documented and written article detailing the well known techniques used to build the iconic stone work in south america. I read an earlier account of a researcher who started investigating pre spanish south american quaries, and how there sudden realisation, while sitting down for lunch, that the round stone to there right, was the hammer used to shape the larger stone to there left and the rows of peck marks ending in raw stone, all of those centuries before. Having worked a bit of stone myself, learning to shape, temper stone drills, and test them for utility, it is very easy to understand how basic pragmatism and persistance, in stone, yields large structures that retain that essential message of we are not messing around in this effort, and your opinions can only embellish this. When considering stone articacts of any scale, it is always best to keep in mind that lithic technology pre dates our "species", and our evolutionary track is directly parallel with it, and there is quite litteraly, mountains of evidence for this.And should you so wish, any modest effort to go look, dig, search the ground, known hunting areas or settlement zones, will yield physical evidence that anyone can examine. our development of technology
> Having worked a bit of stone myself,
Just curious. Do you have some photos?
I've often come across a concept in magic performance that what the performer is aiming at is for the only available explanation for what you see would take an amount of effort that you immediately discount because clearly nobody would put that much effort into making a ping pong ball disappear. There are two ways to make the ping pong ball disappear: either the performer is cheating somehow, or they did actually do it the obvious way and yes, they did put all that effort in.
This seems the same: the idea the people shaped these stones by hand seems so outrageously profligate with human exertion that you look for how they cheated. But the answer is that it's actually slightly less exertion than you think, multiplied across far more humans than you think, but yes, they did go the long way round.