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Meet the Team
Roger Hopkins, Stonemason
NOVA: Can you describe what your everyday work is like
when you're not called off to Egypt to help raise an
obelisk?
HOPKINS: I have a landscape stone masonry business
called Naturalistic Gardens in Sudbury, MA. We build
waterfalls, carve sculpture work, and install patios and
walkways.
NOVA: Have you had any previous experience on a project
like the obelisk raising?
HOPKINS: This is my fourth project for NOVA. We built a
small pyramid, I worked on the Stonehenge project, we already
tried once to raise an obelisk, and now we're trying again.
NOVA: How important do you think your stone masonry
skills are to the outcome of this new attempt?
HOPKINS: I think it's good to bring a practical
knowledge to any program where they're bouncing around all
kinds of theories.
NOVA: How will this attempt be different from the one
in 1994?
HOPKINS: We'll get it up this time—come hell or
high water.
NOVA: So what odds do you give the project of actually
succeeding?
Always the joker, Hopkins (L) shares a laugh with
engineer Mark Whitby (R).
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HOPKINS: I'm pretty confident in the experiments that
we're going to be performing. I don't have total control of
how they're going to raise the obelisk, so it remains to be
seen. I hope to put to rest a lot of the speculation that the
stone works in Egypt were done by Martians.
NOVA: Can you tell us more about the specific
experiments you're going to be doing this time?
HOPKINS: I'm going to show how they sawed and cut holes
in the granite. Some of the finest stone sculpture work in the
world was done there.
NOVA: Do you still think that the sand method that you
tried last time is the way that the Egyptians would have done
it?
HOPKINS: Some derivation thereof, I'm totally
convinced. Well, I won't go out and say I'm "totally"
convinced. I'd say I'm 80 percent sure that that's the way
they would have done it, because it's the easiest.
NOVA: Given how hard it seems to be to raise an obelisk
that's not even as large as the largest ones ever quarried,
how impressive do you find it that the ancient Egyptians
managed to raise these objects?
HOPKINS: I've found that when you're dealing with heavy
stones, the larger they get, the whole dynamics of the game
change. That's one of the problems with using small models:
You can sometimes fudge the results that you couldn't get with
a much heavier stone. So we can only come close to emulating
or trying to duplicate what they did. But I think the work
that the ancient Egyptians did was just totally mind-boggling.
They were dealing with weights that are off the spectrum from
modern day work.
NOVA: What do you expect to learn from this project?
HOPKINS: I expect to bring to conclusion some of the
wild speculation about how some of the stone work was done.
Each time I go there, each time I'm involved in one of these
projects, I learn something new. It's a cumulative thing.
Sometimes I wish we could do the project three, four times, so
we could get to a more adequate conclusion.
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| Updated November 2000
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