Local accessOllantaytambo
“I drive past this every week. Tell me which face you need and I will photograph it properly — scale bar, raking light, the lot.”
Someone who lives twenty minutes away
Family archiveNimrud
“My grandfather worked the 1962 survey here. There is a box of his slides in the attic showing sections that have since been re-pointed.”
Someone clearing out a grandparent's house
Trade expertiseSacsayhuamán
“That joint was not ground flat. You can read the scribe marks — the block was offered up, marked, taken down, cut back, and re-offered. I do it the same way.”
A stonemason of thirty years
CorrectionKarahan Tepe
“The date on this pin traces back to a 1998 popular article, not the excavation report. The report says something narrower. Here is the page.”
A reader who checked the citation
Field reportTiwanaku
“The lower course is not visible in any published photo — it is below the modern walkway. I can get you down there in the dry season.”
A guide who works the site
Language & sourcesOsaka Castle Walls
“There is a Japanese survey of these wall techniques that has never been translated. I can summarise the typology it uses, chapter by chapter.”
Someone who reads the local literature
Local accessTaula of Torralba
“Happy to walk the whole taula group with a tape measure and a compass this month if somebody tells me what to record.”
Someone on the island
Trade expertiseGöbekli Tepe
“Give me twenty overlapping photos with a scale in frame and I will turn this into a measurable model everyone here can argue over.”
A surveyor
MeasurementNewgrange
“I stood the whole sunrise with a compass and a timer. The light reaches the back recess for about seventeen minutes, not the four the guidebooks keep repeating.”
Someone who was there at dawn on the shortest day
CorrectionPuma Punku
“This is described as granite on the site page. It is andesite. That changes the hardness argument completely, and probably the quarry it came from.”
A geologist
ProvenanceBaalbek
“The image everyone shares of this is a 1970s postcard, reversed. The real face is the other way round, which is why the joint never matches the drawings.”
Someone chasing a photo backwards
Field reportNan Madol
“Half the walls are only reachable at low tide and most visitors never see them. I go out most weeks and can carry a camera for whoever needs it.”
A boat operator
Trade expertiseUnfinished Obelisk
“Those are not decorative grooves. That is where a channel was being cut and abandoned — you can see the direction of work and where they stopped.”
A quarry worker
Family archiveHattusa
“I have thirty years of negatives of this place, including the sections that were consolidated in the nineties. Somebody should scan them before I am gone.”
A retired site photographer
MeasurementStonehenge
“Ran the alignment against sunrise azimuth for 3000 BCE rather than today. It shifts by about a degree, and that is worth writing down on the pin itself.”
An amateur astronomer
Language & sourcesDolmen of Menga
“The Spanish report distinguishes two build phases here. Every English summary I can find collapses them into one, which is where the confusion starts.”
Someone who reads the excavation reports in the original
