Real History: Sacbe Roads

I imagine that much of the landscape of Sundaland to be similar to the Yucatan peninsula; jungles, savannahs, swamps and marshes. 

While the majority of travel is likely to be on the rivers it may sometimes be necessary for cultures to build roads where a well followed trail is not sufficient. The Maya built these raised, long and straight roads between plazas and temples and sometimes hundreds of kilometres to other settlements.

In construction, the sacbe is like a long platform. Side retaining walls of roughly dressed stone enclose a roadbed filled with uncut boulders, leveled with gravel, and paved with liberal quantities of sascab — powdered limestone, a natural cement that hardens with water and pressure.  The roadbed is higher in its center to allow drainage, and in some places the builders applied a finishing coat of smooth lime stucco.  Lime cement, of which few traces remain, held the side walls together.  Villa Rojas observed that many of the dressed stones had been taken away for use in more recent walls and buildings.  He found evidence of quarries near the sacbe, doubtless the sources of construction material. 

Consider the enormous amount of labor required to build and maintain the sacbe. The workers were probably corvée labor crews performing the short-term periodic services required of citizens, like faenas for members of an ejido in recent times.  They dug the construction material with hafted stone tools, carried it in baskets, and burned limestone to make lime for cement and stucco. 

We marvel at the size of the monumental pyramids at Maya sites, but the volume of stone in this sacbe is twenty-five times greater than that of the Castillo at Chichén Itzá.  

Scholars have determined that constructing one cubic meter of stone and rubble masonry at the time required at least twelve man-days work, about equally divided between digging and transporting material, manufacturing and transporting lime, and doing the actual construction.  (This does not count the time for planning, traveling, and clearing the land.)  For this sacbe, the math works out to 500 men working for 50 years, a huge effort, but within the scope of the possible.

 

Read more about the scope and purpose of these roads, which went beyond practical considerations in this very interesting article: Yucatan's First Highway

And of course the Wikipedia entry: Wikipedia: Sacbe Roads