Stonehenge: Could You Make A Monument For 5000 Years Service?

[racookpe1978]

Just a question:

Stonehenge began to be built between 2500 and 3000 BC, or about 5000 years ago.

If you were charged with making a memorial to commemorate Stonehenge - with today's materials - so that it would be accurate to the north star, the rise and set of the sun at the solstices, the stars, solar eclipses and lunar eclipses in the year 7100 - 5000 years from now, what would you use to build a similar size and shape monument?

How would you set the foundations and material so they would withstand that long in the open air, but still be accurate to the (future) position of the stars? Granted, many stones at Stonehenge have fallen, and it is very crude model, so you'd have the responsibility of not "re-making" the rough outlines we see now, but (for example) you'd have to carve sharp, accurate edges and making the monument so the "bridges" would not fall.

But how would you do the job? If you pour concrete for the foundation, what would you use as rebar to keep the concrete good that long? Would you make everything of stainless steel? Granite and stainless?

 

[lacajun]

US National Cathedral

This took 83 years to build and supposedly will last 1000 years.

 

[IRstuff]

Looks to me that most human artifacts, made of stone and the like, will survive indefinitely, barring damage or destruction from war. The Pyramids, Easter Island Moai, Parthenon, Megalithic Temples of Malta, Hieraconpolis, and others, are all shaped or constructed by Man, and have survived for hundreds, or thousands, of years.

According to

http://www.bigsiteofamazingfacts.com/where-was-the-oldest-man-made-construction-on-earth-found

there is a circle of lava blocks laid down by Homo Habilis, about 1.7 million years ago.

TTFN

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[drawoh]

IRstuff,

An important issue with monolithic structures like Stonehenge is that you cannot steal building materials, at least, not without hundreds of people helping you.

JHG

 

[IRstuff]

drawoh,

Absolutely, that's why there are gaping holes in the Great Wall, and only fragments left of Troy, since not only did the latecomers steal building materials, they simply built on top of the previous ruins. I'm a bit unclear to me how everything flattens out, but supposedly it was done multiple times.

Nonetheless, it would seem that what the OP asks for is not that hard, in of itself, i.e., just build a structure out of granite or similar igneous rock, located on a seismically, and climatically stable site, and KEEP PEOPLE FROM MESSING WITH IT.

TTFN

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[Compositepro]

One other key element to preservation is being buried. Even the Pyramids have not fared so well over 4000 years. Erosion, freeze-thaw cycles, thermocycling, corrosion, and fungus and plant roots destroy everything eventually.

 

[jmw]

The pyramids were encased in white limestone which proved too much of a temptation.

The trick with Stonehenge is that the finished appearance wasn't that alluring. (Some suggest it had a wooden roof at one time).
Plus for a long while no one recognised it for what it was. Some farmer even tried to get rid of the "nuisance stones" by lighting big fires against them but gave up.

The military is a good idea.
Much of Salisbury Plain is/was army test ranges, tank training etc. If they could have included Stonehenge, so much he better. Some of the best wild life habitat is to be found on land used only by the army. They have a low and infrequent impact and when finances are so bad the troops run around pointing guns and shouting bang because they can't afford ammunition, they do even better.
So make sure to pick a site the army likes.
Oh, except if they can afford ammunition in which case don't build above ground. Witness the use of the Sphynx as an artillery target. Large monuments can be to the military what Greenhouse glass is to a small boy with a catapult. Plus the average squaddy isn't exactly a respecter of ancient or modern monuments. I remember visiting a company in an old country house which the Americans had taken over during WWII. Some idiot GI had decided to drive a jeep up the grand staircase and collapsed it. After that its fate was sealed.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[btrueblood]

Greg,

Have you had trouble finding the paper? There was an article, I think in SciAm, around the time it published, discussing the monument designs etc. etc. from the Sandia teams.

 

[danw2]

I'd start by checking out what the Japanese made the arch out of:

Nagasaki 1945, after the atomic bomb

Nagasaki 2011, after the earthquake and tsunami

 

[IRstuff]

cute...

TTFN

FAQ731-376
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[hokie66]

But oh so inaccurate.

 

[berkshire]

You mean the arch is not there anymore?

The good engineer does not need to memorize every formula; he just needs to know where he can find them when he needs them. Old professor

 

[hokie66]

Don't know about that, but Nagasaki is nowhere near the tsunami location.

 

[jmw]

No but the tsunami was caused by the earthquake and the caption reads: "after the earthquake and tsunami". So it may not have been hit by the tsunami but by the earthquake?

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[hokie66]

Not this earthquake. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are down on the southwest corner of Honshu, which I think is at least 1000 km SW of Tokyo. The earthquake was northeast of Tokyo.

 

[IRstuff]

And certainly, if there was that much earthquake damage, even with the tsunami news dominating the airwaves, there would have been some mention of Nagasaki, specifically because it's Nagasaki. There would have been mention of some sort of curse, getting flattened by an A-bomb, and then, 66 yrs later, getting flattened by an earthquake.

And, to top that off, there's a blog with the same photos and a different story:

http://blogs.forbes.com/christianwo...d-tsunami-photos-echo-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

As a further nail in the coffin, there are pictures of the same type of gate surviving the earthquake in northern Japan, and possibly, the same gate in the other photo:

http://newshopper.sulekha.com/japan-earthquake_photo_1748620.htm

However, there's a example of a similar Torii gate that didn't survive the earthquake:

http://blog.alientimes.org/2011/03/...to-some-farms-shrines-and-temples-in-tsukuba/

TTFN

FAQ731-376
Chinese prisoner wins Nobel Peace Prize

 

[jmw]

OK but that the arch survived an earthquake should not be surprising. I seem to recall that many of the old temples in Japan and in China were surprisingly sophisticated earthquake resistant structures and a quick Google (how I could have done with google in my youth as an instant adjudicator.... it would have saved countless arguments).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_architecture

And the Chinese developed an earthquake sensor that would both sense the event and give some indication of the direction of event.....

http://www.ancientchinaculture.com/things/zhang-heng-and-his-earthquake-sensor.html

and

http://www.clcillinois.edu/programs/esc/index.asp?seismic

and we should not forget the shaking minarets of Sifahan....

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1202984

though as indicated, earthquake resistance is only a supposition.

Wehave to recognise that modern technology does not mean that earlier cultures were not sophisticated. In many cases the label "primitive" is extremely patronising and very inaccurate.

It is one reason why I was so impressed by the very sophisticated theory of pyramid construction which featured in one of these threads and I was fortunate enough to see a TV show on the theory much later.

Some people may tend to think that when we try to understand early construction that the theories we bring to it are too sophisticated for the time despite being rooted in the "available technology".
We might perhaps consider that the modern engineer is actually handicapped when considering ancient construction methods by the fact that he hasn't spent his entire life living within the ancient construction methods.
The thing that has evolved is knowledge and technology. What we might suppose is that men are no more clever today than in the past. So a clever engineer in any era will perform challenging tasks and push the envelope. Indeed, back then with no 'elf 'n safety and an unlimited supply of materials and cash who knows what they could or could not do?
Hence, if we can visualise a way to do things "within the available technology" we might suppose we are still not as adept in using the available technology as a good engineer of the time might be.



JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[IRstuff]

Earthquake resistance of Torii gates was discussed in the separate thread that I ran across:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/travelb...uake+Resistant+History+at+Nikko?destId=356635

Note that the Japanese have been building structures in an earthquake zone since the beginning of their habitation of those islands, so they should have learned something about building earthquake resistant structures in those thousands of years.

TTFN

FAQ731-376
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[drawoh]

I am now reading The Tribes of Britain, by David Miles. He claims that two of the oldest occupied houses in Britain are the following, both in Lincoln, built sometime in the 1100s...

The Jew's House the Strait.

The Norman House in Steep Hill.

Somehow, the buildings have been perceived as useful for 900 years.

JHG

 

[ewh]

Those houses look eerily similar.;-)

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - [small]Robert Hunter[/small]

 

[drawoh]

ewh,

Isn't it amazing how precisely the Normans could reproduce a house back in 1170. Of course, there is no possibility I got the URL wrong on one of them.

JHG