How Ancient Builders Moved Things

               On the cover of the July 2012 issue of National Geographic Magazine is a drawing of one of the Easter Island statues being moved.  There are ropes attached to the top of the head, being tugged at by gangs of brightly painted natives.  The caption reads:  The Riddle of the Moving Statues.   In the article, they explain that the statues might have been moved without recourse to rollers, or wheels, or draft animals.  If ropes attached to the top were used to rock the statue from side to side, and if with each stroke, the side which was momentarily off the ground were pried forward an inch or two, then over time, the statue could be moved for miles.   Well Duh!  The only riddle is why anyone would imagine that this is a riddle.  On any industrial construction job, this is precisely how a lot of heavy objects are moved today.   Barrels, transformers, tall narrow switchgear cabinets, crates--anything that is significantly taller than it is wide can be “walked” in this way.  But this article is just the last in an endless series of articles which ask, “Gosh, how could those primitive people have moved such big things without modern equipment?”  Some fools have even adduced this as evidence of assistance from space aliens.    Whether its stones from the pyramids, from Stonehenge, or Mayan temples, we seem puzzled that pre-industrial peoples could move them.

            But having spent forty years on heavy construction jobs, I can tell you that large and heavy objects can be easily moved, and still are often moved, using no technology that would be unfamiliar to any Egyptian construction worker. With levers, rollers, ropes, and a little muscle, you can move almost anything.  And once you understand how to use leverage, the amount of muscle required is trivial.

            Whenever I have tried to explain this to those outside the skilled trades, they usually protest, “But don’t you guys use cranes, and forklifts, and other heavy equipment?”   Well, of course we do--when we have that option.  We’re not insane, you know.   But such machines usually won’t fit inside a building.  And even if we are working in the open, there might not be such machines on the job site—and even if such equipment is present, it might not belong to the sub-contractor who needs to have the stuff moved.  But when all else fails, we just go back to bars and rollers and ropes, or some other late Neolithic strategy, and it works just fine.  And if these methods work for us today, I’m sure they worked equally well 5,000 years ago.