Ramper og stilladser – Løft af store sten i oldtiden

Ramps and scaffoldsThe lifting of large stones during antiquityUntil well into the 18th century, many scholars thought that megaliths were erected by giants. Less supernatural theories did not occur in print until the 19th century. One of these was expressed in a small pamphlet from 1857, “On the Building Manner of the Passage Graves of the Antiquity”, written by the Danish King Frederik the Seventh. Earlier (1853), the king had been convinced that first the capstones had been placed on a mound and then the uprights had been placed in holes dug out under the capstone (fig. 7). When all uprights were in place, the remaining earth was removed. This so-called mound theory is almost completely forgotten, but it surfaced sporadically in the 20th century, last when J. Osenton was reconstructing dolmens in the Cotswold Hill Quarry by Cheltenham in England in 1996-97.In 1857, Frederik the Seventh put forward the ramp theory, according to which the capstone is pulled up on a ramp to the already finished chamber (fig. 7-8). According to Frederik the Seventh’s proposal, the ramp was built from earth lengthwise covered with timber, on top of which the capstone would have been pulled up on rolls.However, the king had not invented this theory. It was known in Scandinavia and Holland already around 1800. In 1815, N. Westendorf in Holland suggested the use of earth ramps, and the following years the Dutch developed the ramp theory further.Both the early Dutch antiquarians and others referred to the fact that from the 16th to the 19th century (after the Spanish conquest), Inca workers in Peru, when erecting large buildings, used earth ramps for pulling large stones in place. During their golden age (1300-l500 AD), the Incas were masters in building with large stones that weighed up to well over 200 metric tons. Perhaps the know ledge of Inca earth ramps inspired the early European antiquarians to suggest that the megaliths had also been pulled in place by the use of ramps.In 1983, a