That's one way. Another is a (theoretical) advanced society that directs its surplus value into creating art rather than consumerism or oligarchical capital accumulation.
Similarly, I'm fine with creating more homes for people, even if they are not artistic. When the value is on someone living there, as opposed to others looking at it, it sounds a whole lot differently.
Do you find that explanation convincing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapping#Two-piece_lapping
As the other comment here says, this isn't a mystery. It's just extremely labour-intensive.
And as I said there, I don't find that kind of blaise response as convincing or substantial. Labour intensive way of lifting and lapping 140 tonne rocks?
Most of the stuff from the ancient would is quite easy to reproduce--throw hordes of people at it. The ancient world didn't have some fantastically superior knowledge.
I forget the magician, but he stated something along the lines of "Magic is simply being willing to devote to accomplishing a task an amount of time and preparation that any rational person would regard as insanity."
Sadly, when the ancient world couldn't support throwing hordes of people at the problems, it collapsed.
I don't find this type of explanation convincing at all. If your claim was true, then just look at the fact that we still can't reproduce such structures today. I would allege the type of sentiment and thinking your paragraph is representing borders on arrogance. I'm reminded of the story of the illiterate Roman soldier w ho murdered Archimedes and said that man was just drawing circles in the sand.
We are a violent illiterate people who murdered Incan Archimedes and their khippus and since we can't understand their science we try to put down their structures as 'throw hordes of people'.
The other key is that the hordes of people should be expendable.
Imagine what our GDP would be like if companies were still allowed to work us all to death!
Oh wait.
Except that they really weren't.
The Egyptian pyramids, for example, had an entire support ecosystem around it--guilds, hospitals, lodging, everything. The people working on building the pyramids were probably slightly better off than the average person.
Those methods cannot compete with free labor.
Pulling on this thread a bit more - slavery died out because it became uncompetitive. I suspect it being found to be immoral around the same time is not a coincidence.
https://www.geopolymer.org/news/geopolymer-in-south-american...
When the Conquistadors encountered the structures, they had no idea how they were being made or put together. They pulled them apart and used the pulled apart chunks with mortar to build cathedrals that mostly fell apart every time there was a tectonic movement. So much knowledge in those khipus burnt by religious fanatics.
We use cement concrete which is a massive source of CO2 production. If we could have somehow preserved the knowledge of how those structures were built instead of burning their knowledge, and killing their stone masons and scientists, we could have had a very different modern world today.