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2 Responses to Forum

1. Joe Payne says:

   March 6, 2012 at 4:27 pm

   Mr. Feagans,

   I am a working Industrial and QA Engineer. I have read a lot of pseudoscience claiming that artifacts or construction could not have been done by our ancestors with the tools available to them at the time. To your knowledge has anyone tried describing the stone-work, assembly, or other processes from the industrial engineering discipline?
2. Carl Feagans says:

   March 8, 2012 at 1:18 pm

   Yes, absolutely. There has been a lot of good work done in this area and it’s commonly referred to as experimental archaeology. You mentioned stone work: archaeologist Mark Lehner teamed up with a stone mason a few decades ago and the two experimented in quarrying techniques as well as pyramid construction techniques and not only demonstrated that period tools and knowledge was sufficient, it was efficient.

   There are many other examples of experimental archaeology out there, ranging from lithic studies of small tools to large scale studies of migration. You might try these for stone working:

   Lehner, Mark (1997). The Complete Pyramids. Thames and Hudson. New York.
   Arnold, Dieter (1991). Building in Egypt: Pharonic Stone Masonry. Oxford University Press. New York, New York.