Megalithic post-and-lintel construction

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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.