Authenticity and Scholarship

The claim is that the stones are ancient and depict real coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. The evidence against it is direct. Basilio Uschuya, the main supplier, admitted more than once that he carved the stones; for the 1977 BBC documentary Pathway to the Gods he engraved a fresh stone with a dental drill and described faking the aged patina by baking the stone in cow dung, and he said the images had been copied from comics and textbooks. His later attempts to walk the confession back, claiming he had called the stones fakes only to escape prosecution for selling antiquities, do not overcome the physical and contextual problems: the dinosaurs are drawn as modern reconstructions rather than as any animal an ancient artist could have seen, and andesite carvings cannot be dated, so nothing establishes antiquity. Mainstream archaeology and geology regard the Ica stones as twentieth-century productions. They remain of interest as a case study in pseudo-archaeology and in how confessions, markets, and belief interact.