Moving 400-ton Stone Blocks in 600 B.C.

In a recent article sent to me by a friend entitled “Built on Granite,” it begins “Operating the controls on a mining crane, Justin Marks, 55, hoists a 10-ton block of granite from the Dixie Quarry and gently places the blue-gray stone on a semi-tractor trailer bound for a manufacturing plant a few miles always in Elberton, Georgia.” (name changed)

I thought this story was interesting about a company founded in 1889 when a granite quarry opened 10 miles west of town, which was the distance the stone was moved from quarry to manufacturer. Interesting because if was the same distance the early Peruvians quarried and moved stone blocks around Lake Titicaca to build temples.

About 2500 years earlier, as mentioned in my last post, ancient Peruvians moved their 400+ ton stones to the magnificent site at Akapana, Tiahuanaco, during the first century B.C., to build temples, the largest of which measured 650 by 600 feet and ascended 50 feet (five stories) high.

And they did it without cranes or semi-trucks and trailers.

In 1540, when the Spaniards came, followed by the Christian priests, they learned from the local Indians that these ruins were there long before the Inca civilization came to power in the area, approximately 100 years earlier. After looking over the magnificence of these ruins, the size of the stones quarried 10 miles away and moved there to build the awesome temples and buildings, these men of learning doubted that the local Indians could ever have been capable of the craftsmanship and engineering such massive structures required. Legends began to be spread by the missionaries that the structures had been erected in the distant past by giants, or was the work of the Devil.

As a result, the Spaniards tore the buildings down, destroyed the temples—leaving the massive stones to lay where they fell in a jumble along the ground, to later be broken up by the railroad in the 1920s for road base for their tracks.

The story of Tiahuanaco would have been lost to modern knowledge had it not been for the Book of Mormon and the story of Nephi and his building a temple like unto Solomons, and teaching his people how to work with wood and metals beyond modern science’s understanding of this ancient past. Nephi knew how to molten ore to fashion tools capable of such building when the rest of the world was still using stone obsidian and copper for their tools.

Without the Book of Mormon, this ancient culture of the Andes, and the later one of Mesoamerica, would have been lost to history. And the deeds of the Nephites and their fabulous accomplishments, many unequalled anywhere in the world outside Egypt, would have been merely the ruins we now see and of which most of the world has no understanding.
Ancient quarries found in Peru