How did the Ancients do It?

It is always so mysterious, the Mystery of the Pyramids, the Mystery of the Incas.

How in the heck did they figure out how to build a pyramid that would last? How did those Incas fit those stones together? How did they make mummies? Even with our best technology, it is nearly impossible to even guess.

You may as well ask what life is like for a goldfish whose attention span is three seconds.

The assumption is that we are the latest, the greatest, and the brightest humans ever and that anyone who lived more than one hundred years ago was not much smarter than the common household pet.

It ain't necessarily so.

Take the Incas, for example. How did they ever figure out how to fit stone blocks together so well?

Professor Ivan Watkins of St. Cloud University, Minnesota has theorized that the Inca Pachacutec was wearing the golden discs of the sun for reasons other than just ornamental. He feels that those brilliant discs represented parabolic mirrors that were used to amplify the sun's light to melt rock. He attempted to demonstrate this on Nova's Secrets of Lost Empires - Incas. (NOVA: Secrets of Lost Empires - Inca (1997).

"Consequently, I propose the following hypothesis to explain how the Incas cut and polished their incredible stonework. First, the energy used was solar energy focused with large parabolic gold mirrors (figure 4). The reflectors could be made of any focal length, or combined with plane mirrors to cut in any direction at essentially any distance from the large primary reflector" (Watkins, 1986).

While he was only able to set a Popsicle stick on fire, I think he was on to something. After all, there are all sorts of applications for uses of parabolic mirrors, light, heat, and lasers.