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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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Not to diminish either the abilities of the builders or the sincerity of the researchers, it strikes me that there's sort of an anthropic principle dynamic going on here...
That this structure exhibits sound building techniques essentially goes without saying, since it's still standing. If it didn't, it wouldn't be, so researchers wouldn't be able to study it and draw countervailing conclusions from it.
Based on the article, it sounds like they actually did have a basic understanding of sound building techniques because they went above and beyond the basics by doing things like carving sockets into the bedrock.
However that doesn't mean they all gathered around a table, broke out their blueprints, calipers, slide rules and abacuses to design a structure that would last millenia. As you're implying, there are likely many others that didn't last that long.
My very uneducated speculation is that the ones still standing were later ones built after they'd already had a lot of practice building things. There were likely tens or hundreds of them that didn't last because they were still figuring out how to build structurally stable buildings.
I feel articles like this give off "alien must have built the pyramids" energy. We've always been smart, but what modern civilizations have is systematic recording, organization & dispersal of gained knowledge with an amazing efficiency. I think a great example of great ingenuity lost is roman concrete, recipe for which was only recreated recently.
Can anyone tell me the academic benefit of studying/publishing ancient building techniques that confirm modern day methods? Should we not look for unknown/unfamiliar techniques that might have been lost to time?
Yes, that’s what made them builders