Cult and Fringe Archaeology

7 The Ica Stones

Large numbers of incised stones were collected by Dr Javier Cabrera Darquea (1924-2001) in the village of Ica, around 300 km northwest of Lima, Peru. His first stone was given to him by a local farmer as a birthday present in 1966. He subsequently amassed around 20,000 individual stones, ranging in size from a few centimetres to over half a metre, that are now displayed in the Museo de Piedras Grabadas (Museum of Engraved Stones) in Ica. What piqued his interest was that the first stone he was given depicted what he identified as an extinct species of fish. After talking with the locals, he claimed to have discovered many more stones hidden in a cave near the coastal mountains, where there are at least 100,000 more that he had not removed. He never revealed the location of the cave to archaeologists who might assess this cache of stones in situ. Having made his discovery, the Doctor gave up his medical practice in Lima and opened his private museum.

Most of the stones are fist-sized pebbles of grey andesite, with a granitic semi-crystalline matrix. It is a hard stone that is difficult to carve, but the images are scratched through the oxidised surfaces. Engraved stones were first recorded in the region by a Jesuit missionary Padre Simón, who accompanied Pizarro to Peru in 1525 and examples were sent to Spain in 1562.

The engravings collected by Cabrera show allegedly very surprising images, with medical procedures, the use of telescopes and, most surprisingly of all, humans interacting with dinosaurs, including brontosaurs, stegosaurs, tyrannosaurs and pterodactyls. Unfortunately, the images are all highly stylised and it is curious that Dr Cabrera has never indicated what features of the fish on the first stone he was given led him to believe that it is an extinct species, or, indeed, what that species might be and when it became extinct.

The farmer who gave Cabrera his first stone was subsequently arrested for selling the stones to tourists. In his defence, he said that he had not in fact found them in a cave, as he had told Dr Cabrera, but made them himself. Other local people continue to make these engraved stones, thus selling forged hoaxes! However, Cabrera counters this claim with the sheer numbers of stones. As well as the 20,000 or so in his collection and those sold to tourists, he says that locals have found about 50,000, while the cave contains another 100,000. This is too great a number to be the effort of a single poor farmer with little spare time to create so many hoaxes. Nevertheless, he maintains that he has carved at least some of them. Neither he nor Dr Cabrera revealed the location of the cave that is supposed to contain the huge cache of stones.

It is possible that some of the stones are genuine examples of pre-Columbian Peruvian art, but at least some are forgeries. Many of the allegedly anomalous images are so highly stylised that it is difficult to see exactly what is being depicted. Some are so plainly bizarre that they can be discounted, as in the example showing a human riding on the shoulders of a pteranodon, a species of pterosaur that could never have supported such a weight.

8 The Acambaro figurines

In July 1945 (although some accounts say 1944), a German immigrant to Mexico, Waldemar Julsrud (1875/6-1952), a hardware merchant, discovered a number of clay figurines at the foot of El Toro Mountain on the outskirts of Acambaro, Guanajuato. Charles Hapgood (1904-1982), the historian of science from Keene College (New Hampshire, USA) who first made the impossible claims about the Piri Re’is map, also promoted claims that the figurines are genuinely ancient artefacts showing extinct animals, including dinosaurs. On the other hand, he was troubled by the near-perfect condition of what are often very delicate objects and the complete absence of any sort of patination that might have developed during centuries (or even millennia) of burial. It has been claimed that radiocarbon dates from organic materials on their surfaces are around 6,500 years old, although neither precise dates nor laboratory numbers are supplied. There is little doubt that the figurines are of recent date; thermoluminescent tests would be sufficient to establish their approximate date of manufacture. This does not prevent fringe writers from complaining that archaeologists have dismissed them as fakes without taking the trouble to examine them.

The authenticity of the artefacts has been questioned, and it has been suggested that many, if not all of them, are modern souvenirs made for the tourist industry. Even if they are genuine, there is debate about what they depict. None of the published examples really resembles any known dinosaur. Instead, it has been suggested that they are stylised representations of living reptiles of the region or are composite fantastical monsters. Thermoluminescent dating would establish whether the objects are of recent manufacture of genuinely ancient, but it has not been carried out on any of them.

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