Fire was a key method in extracting stone in the old days – more important than we usually think of. Photo by Per Storemyr
It started with Egyptologist and engineer Reginald Engelbach almost a hundred years ago. By the early 1920s he found evidence that fire would have been used in extraction of the famous Unfinished Obelisk at the Aswan granite quarries. But he was probably wrong when he implied that fire was used to remove poor quality bedrock only. New evidence suggests that fire was used in several steps of extracting obelisks and other stone objects in Ancient Egypt. And written documentation of firesetting may, in fact, go as far back as to the Middle Kingdom, some 4000 years ago. With geologist Tom Heldal as the driving force behind the work, we recently published a brief account of firesetting, based on our findings in Egyptian quarries over the last decade. Read on for abstract of our paper, get a PDF-link and view a gallery of images. Continue reading
Per Storemyr Geoarchaeology & Conservation 