Megalithic post-and-lintel construction

Assembled from 11 blocks · 2 evidence · 7 related

1. Story
2. Building by standing large stones upright and laying further stones across them. The uprights work purely in compression and can be very tall; the lintel across the top works in bending, and stone is poor in bending because the underside of a loaded beam goes into tension. That single fact sets the ceiling on the whole system: a stone lintel can rarely span much more than about five metres before it cracks at midspan under its own weight. Megalithic builders therefore bought span with more supports, not with longer beams, which is why megalithic and early temple architecture is a forest of closely spaced columns rather than an open hall. The technique demands no mortar, no arithmetic and no metal - only quarrying, transport, levering and jointing - and it appears independently across Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe, the Mediterranean, South Asia and East Asia.
3. Knowledge
4. Megalithic post-and-lintel construction
5. Connections
6. Load path
7. Stonehenge
8. The sarsen circle and trilithons are raised at Stonehenge
9. Evidence
10. Comparative structural analysis of large pre-industrial buildings, treating span, thrust and material strength as the variables that determine what each period could build. Supports the load-path framing used throughout this pack and the structural contrasts drawn between post-and-lintel, corbelling, the voussoir arch, the dome and the rib vault. V55 verification basis: this volume is a real and standard reference named in the Journey declaration, but it was NOT consulted in this session - WebFetch is refused by the environment egress proxy for all research domains and the session WebSearch budget was exhausted before production began.
11. The Stonehenge and Avebury monument complex is inscribed on the World Heritage List, with the sarsen phase of Stonehenge conventionally dated to the third millennium BCE. V55 verification basis: whc.unesco.org is blocked by the environment egress proxy and could not be opened; the inscription year and list reference number are stated from established record and must be confirmed.