A Supplier Who Admitted the Trick

The strongest evidence against the stones' antiquity did not come from a laboratory but from one of Cabrera's own primary suppliers, a farmer and craftsman named Basilio Uchuya, who stated publicly that he and others carved the stones using modern dental drills and then artificially aged them, in some accounts specifically to profit from Cabrera's eager and well-paying interest in acquiring more. Geological and archaeological assessment of the carving technique, tool marks and surface weathering has broadly supported this account, finding nothing consistent with the stones having been carved and buried for millennia, and no reputable archaeological or paleontological institution recognises the collection as genuine.

Cabrera's museum has never accepted this conclusion, continuing to present the stones according to his original interpretation after his death, and Uchuya himself reportedly recanted his confession at various points, muddying rather than clarifying the record further. The result is a rare case in this atlas where the weight of technical evidence for forgery is about as strong as such evidence gets, while the institution holding the objects continues to advocate the opposite conclusion as its stated purpose, a tension the atlas records rather than resolves on the museum's behalf.