@kristiedegaris it’s an amazing place. Lucky enough to visit almost 30 years ago.

@kristiedegaris Honestly, it's more surprising there aren't more ruins from super early civilisations in the entire Eastern half of Africa given the people who settled there likely had a leg up on the Greeks and Romans by virtue of not having to travel as far to get to the place where the thing was built.

@kristiedegaris Wow!

The Great Zimbabwe structure immediately reminds me of the ancient dún fortresses here in Ireland, such as Dún Aonghusa.

Thank you for sharing this (and f'ck colonialists and racism!).

(Image source: https://heritageireland.ie/visit/places-to-visit/dun-aonghasa/)

#MastoDaoine #Zimbabwe #DryStone #Archaeology

@kristiedegaris The 'other side' of putting the lime in the coconut, is mixing lime with a natural binder, like coconut 'hair', then packing it into dirt blocks/construction.

I hear is holds up quite well.

@kristiedegaris A friend just came back from Peru, sent me several pictures of Sacsayhuamán, including one with a person standing in front, to show size. What an achievement! And I've shared pics with you of the amazing walls in Chaco Canyon. Humans did amazing things with stone. (Not aliens.)

@kristiedegaris The walls in Peru feature in a Netflix series which really wound me up. The presenter argued that ancient peoples had some kind of fire sword to cut the stone and give the "melted" appearance.

@kristiedegaris Classical archaeology has been plagued by similar colonialist and racist attitudes, which sought to undermine continuity from ancient Athenians or Mycenaeans or Romans to the populations of the emerging nineteenth-century nation states. You can still see it in arguments defending the retention of the Parthenon sculptures, for example.

@kristiedegaris Zimbabwe mentioned! 😁😁😁

@kristiedegaris "I am a drystone waller/All day I drystone wall./ Of all appalling callings/Drystone walling's worst of all." - Pam Ayres (Though I suspect she never tried hedging with thorn bushes.)

@kristiedegaris Amusing that the Greeks called the Mycenaean walls "Cyclopean", because they didn't believe their ancestors could have shifted the enormous boulders themselves, and it must have been the Cyclopes (one-eyed giants) who did it.

@kristiedegaris Ah, the oldest trope in archaelogy pop culture; Egyptians didn't build the pyramids and if they did then they Ancient Egyptians have nothing whatsoever to do with Modern day Egyptians! (whose DNA has got corrupted or something)

🙄

@kristiedegaris Sacsayhuamán is awesome! This "aliens" discussion is so frustrating, especially considering that a key reason we know little about how they built those structures is because of colonial powers systematically destroying indigenous documents.

@kristiedegaris sorry, that's very interesting, I knew nothing about it
There's still someone that says they are not local creation? I read that these theories were demolished in 1930 as even before...
History has always been bent for other interests, political and economical ones
Even the same European history has been deformed and used, so many times...

@kristiedegaris
Wow I live I africa but I have heard about it
Do you live in africa

@kristiedegaris A lot of white people in apartheid South Africa firmly believed Zimbabwe was "obviously" built by the Phoenicians.

A lot of the stone structures across South Africa were just demolished by white farmers for building materials.

@kristiedegaris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYhBBcdjgMI

@kristiedegaris

> Yet nobody questions who built the impressive structures in Rome or Greece.


BS. that claim is essentially false.

It is not true that “nobody questions who built the impressive structures in Rome or Greece,” and it is not true that we know nothing about it.

The more accurate answer is this: we usually do not know the names of the individual laborers who carried stones, mixed mortar, cut blocks, or raised walls. But we do know quite a lot about the categories of people involved, the institutions behind the works, the funding, the contracts, the workshops, the architects, the craftsmen, and sometimes even the names of builders, contractors, slaves, freedmen, or professional associations.

For Rome and Greece, we have several kinds of evidence.

We have building inscriptions. Many ancient monuments explicitly state who commissioned them, who paid for them, who restored them, or who dedicated them. In Rome this was extremely common: emperors, magistrates, wealthy citizens, cities, provinces, and associations all left inscriptions on buildings. A famous example is the Pantheon, which still carries the inscription of Agrippa, even though the building we see today is mostly from Hadrian’s period.

We also have ancient literary sources. Writers such as Vitruvius, Pliny, Pausanias, Strabo, Livy, Cassius Dio, and others discuss buildings, techniques, patrons, artists, architects, and major public works. They are not always as precise as a modern archive, but we are not in the dark.

We have administrative and financial records. In the Greek world, especially for temples and sanctuaries, some accounts were carved into stone: payments, materials, suppliers, wages, and work stages. In places such as Athens and Delos, these records give us direct evidence of how public and religious construction projects were organized.

We also have material evidence, such as brick stamps in the Roman world. These can indicate workshops, kiln owners, dates, administrators, and sometimes elite or imperial ownership. They do not tell us “this exact worker placed this exact brick,” but they do allow historians and archaeologists to reconstruct supply chains, chronology, and production systems.

And then there is archaeology itself: quarries, ramps, scaffolding traces, tools, construction marks, repairs, unfinished blocks, mistakes, changes of plan, and workers’ graffiti. Even when no text survives, the construction process often leaves physical evidence.

In some cases, we even know the names of architects or designers. For the Parthenon, for example, ancient tradition names Ictinus and Callicrates as architects, with Phidias supervising the artistic and sculptural program. In Rome, we know figures such as Apollodorus of Damascus, associated with major imperial projects.

So no, these buildings are not “mysterious” in your pseudohistorical sense.

They were built by societies perfectly capable of organizing large-scale labor: slaves, free wage workers, specialized craftsmen, engineers, architects, contractors, quarrymen, transport crews, public officials, religious authorities, and political patrons.

What we often lack is the name of the individual worker who carved one block or laid one stone. But that is very different from saying that we do not know who built them. Ancient societies usually recorded the patron, the funder, the magistrate, the emperor, the temple, or the architect — not every anonymous laborer on the site.

So the correct version would be:

“We usually do not know the names of the individual workers who built Greek and Roman monuments, but we have substantial evidence about their patrons, designers, construction techniques, labor organization, materials, suppliers, workshops, and building processes.”

That is very different from “we know nothing.”

--
Uriel Fanelli
Using Aktor: https://git.keinpfusch.net/loweel/Aktor-2
XMPP: uriel@keinpfusch.net
blog: https://blog.keinpfusch.net

@kristiedegaris politics determines who the world is for, nothing more.

You can read the first installment of Drystone Diary here

https://kristiedegaris.substack.com/p/drystone-diary-what-is-drystone

@kristiedegaris was the last line meant to be a link?

@kristiedegaris the "aliens built it " trope is pure racism always has been part of the pseudoscientific "ancient astronaut theory " Von Daniken was a major proponent and a nasty colonial racist among others who then wrote books and created films full of nonsense

@kristiedegaris

Racism is what you call that… fed by white colonial christians…

@kristiedegaris

It's colonialist propaganda: we've seen how they belittle our indigenous population here in México, foreign archaeologists that refer to our pyramids and structures as "not possible" and "probably from people that came from elsewhere" and yet there they are, majestic and strong and wouldn't you know it, Still Here.

They do it to obscure the advancements of "others*"...

*: not caucasians.