The Pre-Columbian Stone Spheres of Costa Rica
Presenting one of Pre-Columbian America's most perplexing enigmas: over three hundred petrospheres discovered in Costa Rica's Diquís Delta region and Isla del Caño, locally referred to as Las Bolas. The lingering questions: Who created them, when, and most importantly, for what purpose?
In 1930, the United Fruit Company was busy planting numerous banana trees in in Costa Rica, on Isla del Caño, when workers found a series of enigmatic perfect stone spheres, all of different sizes, each with a weigh up to 16 tons and a diameter of up-to two meters.
The petrospheres were made of solid-granodiorite , an intrusive igneous rock of the granite family very hard to work. The mysterious spheres were cut, shaped and then polished with great care.
Over the years, the number of discovered spheres has reached the remarkable figure of 300 units. Locally, they are known simply as Las Bolas (the Balls) and today decorate some public buildings in Costa Rica, such as the Legislative Assembly, hospitals and schools. Some of them are preserved in national museums while some can be found as decorations of the gardens of rich and powerful men, to underline their status symbol.
There are no longer any doubts about their authenticity, so much so that UNESCO, in June 2014, included them in the list of World Heritage Sites. But, who made them and why?
Whoever built them left no written documents.
Made famous by the opening sequence of the film "Raiders of the Lost Ark", in which they appear, "las bolas" represent a real mystery for scholars who have been trying to understand their origin for years. The oldest could date back to around 600 AD. and among the most disparate theories there are those who associate them with the disappearance of Atlantis.
The only available method for dating spherical stones is stratigraphy, but most of them are no longer in their original positions. Thus, the spheres are commonly attributed to the Diquis, a pre-Columbian culture indigenous to Costa Rica that flourished from 700 to 1530 AD
Stones are believed to have been extracted from a quarry located in the Talamanca mountain range, more than 80 km away from their final location. Incomplete spheres have never been found.
In 1940, Samuel K. Lothrop studied granodiorite spheres. In his conclusions, he suggested that the stones had been positioned in astronomically significant alignments. Unfortunately, to date there is no way to verify whether Lothrop's theory is correct.
In addition to scientific theories, it seems appropriate to also report the myths that are told about these enigmatic rocky spheres. Some local legends claim that the native inhabitants were in possession of a technique capable of softening the rock, allowing them to mold and shape it to their liking.
A similar legend is also told about the builders of Sacsayhuamán and Cuzco. Legend states that the ancients were in possession of a particular liquid obtained from plants, capable of making the stone soft and easy to shape.
In Bribri cosmology, shared by the Cabecares culture and other American ancestral groups, the stone spheres are referred to as the "cannon-balls of Tara." Tara, or Tlatchque, was worshiped as a god of thunder, who used a giant cannon to fire his shots at Serkes, deity of winds and hurricanes, in order to drive him away from his possessions.
Still others believe that the rock spheres of Costa Rica are remnants of the ancient Atlantean culture that once flourished across the planet. The rocks would not have been made by Native Americans, but simply inherited and kept as a reminder of the Golden Age.
Clearly, as always happens with these archaeological "anomalies", these are findings that do not adapt well to the traditional and linear vision of the history of humanity, as in the case of the Bimini Wall, the submerged Pyramids of Japan and the megalithic structures that every occupy a corner of our planet.
The usual enigmatic question is: do we really know who we are, where we come from and, above all, where we are going ?
