History and Provenance

Javier Cabrera Darquea began collecting the stones in 1966 and continued for decades, gathering thousands and opening a museum in Ica to display them and to argue that they recorded a lost, technologically advanced humanity. His principal source was the farmer Basilio Uschuya, who, with others, produced a steady supply. No Ica stone entered the collection through a documented archaeological excavation; all came through the antiquities and tourist trade. This lack of provenance is itself significant, because the entire evidential value claimed for the stones depends on their being genuinely ancient, and there is no independent record placing any of them in an ancient context. As demand grew, so did the number of stones and the elaborateness of their scenes, a pattern typical of a market-driven production rather than a finite ancient corpus.

The Ica Stones, engraved andesite cobbles depicting, among other things, humans apparently interacting with dinosaurs, are associated chiefly with the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera Darquea, who assembled a large collection from the 1960s onward and argued they were evidence of an advanced ancient civilisation with knowledge of extinct species.