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Stonehenge and its Environs »
The bluestone debate
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Steve Gray
Steve Gray
931 posts

Re: The bluestone debate
Nov 19, 2008, 23:52
GordonP wrote:
Although you seem to ignore my reasoning that if you need 640 men to move a stone on rollers then my seemingly slower method of stone-rowing is actually far quicker because I can move 10 megaliths at the same time with such a workforce.


It's not a case of ignoring it, we just don't accept it. Your conclusion is just fanciful.

It took a long time to row the stone a few tens of yards. It moved about 6 inches per stroke and around 10 strokes per minute at best. That's 5 feet per minute or 300 feet per hour, which is 0.0568 miles per hour.

We actually didn't achieve anywhere near that in practice because the levers needed frequent respositioning, they wore quickly, some broke, there was slippage betwen the levers and the support logs and against the bottom of the block, and despite our efforts to slew the stone back on course with the levers it still kept veering away from the intended direction. The actual achieved speed was more like 0.02 mph.

On the other hand the pullers quickly achieved a brisk walking speed of around 4 miles per hour. We started shouting out the number of feet travelled against a tape measure, but it soon got so fast that we couldn't say the numbers quickly enough to keep up.

So the achieved speed ratio was around 200:1 with a workforce ratio of only 10:1.

Even allowing for a conservative 3:1 rest/work ratio, draggin is still at least seven times more efficient.
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