Stonemasonry or stonecraft is the creation of buildings, structures, and sculpture using stone as the primary material. Stonemasonry is the craft of shaping and arranging stones, often together with mortar and even the ancient lime mortar, to wall or cover formed structures.

The basic tools, methods and skills of the banker mason have existed as a trade for thousands of years. It is one of the oldest activities and professions in human history. Many of the long-lasting, ancient shelters, temples, monuments, artifacts, fortifications, roads, bridges, and entire cities were built of stone. Famous works of stonemasonry include Göbekli Tepe, the Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Cusco's Incan Wall, Taqwesan, Easter Island's statues, Angkor Wat, Borobudur, Tihuanaco, Tenochtitlan, Persepolis, the Parthenon, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, the Mesoamerican pyramids, Chartres Cathedral, and the Stari Most.

While stone was important traditionally, it fell out of use in the modern era, in favor of brick and steel-reinforced concrete. This is despite the advantages of stone over concrete. Those advantages include:

Modern stonemasonry is in the process of reinventing itself for automation, modern load-bearing stone construction, innovative reinforcement techniques, and integration with other sustainable materials, like engineered wood.

Stone has been used in construction for thousands of years, in many contexts. Listed below are six types of classical stonemasonry techniques, some of which still see widespread use.

In the modern era, stone has been largely relegated to being a cosmetic element of buildings, often used as decorative cladding on steel-reinforced concrete. This is despite its wide historical use in large compressive structures: 50-m bridges and colosseums in Roman times, ~65-m tall cathedrals since the Middle Ages, and 12-story apartment buildings built in the 1690s.

Massive precut stone is also known as "prefabricated", or "pre-sized" stone is a modern method of building with load-bearing stone. Precut stone is a DFMA construction method that uses large machine-cut stone blocks with precisely defined dimensions to rapidly assemble buildings in which stone is used as a major or the primary load-bearing material.

Massive precut stone construction was originally developed by Fernand Pouillon in the postwar period. He referred to the method as "pierre de taille" or "pré-taille" stone. It became possible through innovations by Pouillon and Paul Marcerou, a masonry engineer at a quarry in Fontvieille, to adapt high-precision saws from the timber industry to quarrying and stone sawing.