Ed Barnhart: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I have to ask about the giant stones the Inca has been able to somehow move and fit together perfectly. Do you understand? Is it understood how they were able to do that so well? No. The moving of it, I think that we have reasonable theories. There are ways to pivot large weights. There’s a great guy named Wally Wallington, a retired contractor here in the US who built Stonehenge in his backyard in Minnesota, single-handedly showing how you can move big stones. So I think Wally’s already figured out how to move them. It’s the perfectly fit so carefully fit together that you couldn’t even put a dime in between the stones. That’s the one that I think still has people baffled. The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids. I think they melted them together. And there are weird places when you really look at closely to these stones, which I’ve done a number of times. I’m going back next month to Machu Picchu and especially Cusco. I walk around in the alleys where these 500 to a thousand-year-old walls are still there. And I see things like the crystals in the andesite are almost stitched together along the seams. The andesite around it is melted and the crystals haven’t. And there are other places where there are weird wipes on the wall. It’s just melted. Like somebody took a rag and wiped it while it was soft. Lots of talk about soft stones turning hard too. I haven’t been able to prove it. This is one of these end of my archeological career chapters. I’m either going to prove myself wrong or prove it, but I think they used acids. My dad’s a chemist and he told me a long time ago that there’s no way, there’s no naturally occurring acids. But my current theory, actually, I got the idea initially from the show Breaking Bad. I don’t know if you ever saw that show, but there’s a point in which they’re trying to dissolve a body and they’re using hydrofluoric acid and it goes right through the ceiling. That hydrofluoric acid is so fascinating. It won’t go through plastic, and you can also bring it in inert parts and then combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes, and they also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid. hen combine it. The Inca made tons of jewelry out of fluorite. Fluorite is big in the Andes, and they also mined a lot of things for gold and silver. And the byproduct of that mining is sulfuric acid. You put sulfuric acid and fluorite together and it’s hydrofluoric acid, and that will burn through andesite or anything. And if you learned how to do it judiciously and you didn’t care whether servants lost an arm or two, then you could actually use them to fuse these together. And I think they’re fused together. I asked the city of Cusco if I could take some core samples, and they said, go away, gringo. Don’t touch our walls. So actually this next time I’m going to go try to talk to the more Quechua authorities in a place called Ollantaytambo and maybe I can convince them, but right now, they just think I’m a weird-ass gringo who wants to put holes in their walls.…

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