Imagine you are about to plan and construct a building that involves several complicated geometrical shapes, but you aren't allowed to write down any numbers or notes as you do it. For most of us, this would be impossible.
Yet, new research from Arizona State University has revealed that the ancient Southwestern Pueblo people, who had no written language or written number system, were able to do just that -- and used these skills to build sophisticated architectural complexes.
However, as Towers delved deeper into the site's layout and architecture, interesting patterns began to emerge. The geometrical shapes used within this location would be familiar to any high school student: equilateral triangles, squares, degree right triangles, Pythagorean triangles, and the "Golden rectangle," which was well known to architects in ancient Greece and Egypt and is often used in Western art due to its pleasing proportions. With some geometrical know-how, a straight-edge, a compass or cord, and a unit of measurement, all of the shapes are fairly easy to construct.
But, unlike the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Maya, the ancestral Pueblo people had no written language or number system to aid them when they built the site. Incredibly, their measurements were still near-perfect, with a relative error of less than one percent.
If you asked someone today to try to reconstruct this site and achieve the same precision that they had using just a stick and a piece of cord, it's highly unlikely they'd be able to do it, especially if they couldn't write anything down as they were working.
