Ica Stones

The Ica stones are engraved andesite cobbles from the desert region around Ica, in southern Peru, that became famous through the collection of the local physician Javier Cabrera Darquea from the mid-1960s. Their carvings show human beings interacting with dinosaurs, performing heart transplants and brain surgery, and using telescopes and other instruments. To fringe and young-earth creationist writers these images have seemed to prove that humans lived alongside dinosaurs and possessed advanced knowledge in deep antiquity.

In reality the stones are modern. The farmer who supplied most of them confessed to carving them, no example has ever come from a controlled excavation, and the imagery depends on ideas, such as the appearance of specific dinosaurs, that could only be known from modern books. The site records the Ica stones as a debunked hoax whose objects are extant, since the carved stones plainly exist; what is rejected is the claim that they are ancient records of impossible knowledge.

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.

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.