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Ica stones


The Ica stones are a collection of andesite stones found in Ica Province, Peru that bear a variety of diagrams. Some of them supposedly have depictions of dinosaurs, and what is alleged to be advanced technology. These are recognised as modern curiosities or hoaxes.

From the 1960s Javier Cabrera Darquea collected and popularized the stones, obtaining many of them from a farmer named Basilio Uschuya. Uschuya, after claiming them to be real ancient artifacts, admitted to creating the carvings he had sold and said he produced a patina by baking the stone in cow dung.

The stones are composed of andesite. They vary in size from 3x2.5x1.5 cm to 40 cm. As a result of weathering, they have developed a thin patina. It consists of a weathering rind in which weathering has turned some of the feldspar into clay, resulting in a softer material, rated 3 to 4 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, which can be scratched.

They are shallowly engraved with a variety of images, some directly incised, others by removing the background, leaving the image in relief. The images vary from simple pictures on one side of a pebble, up to designs of great complexity. Some of the designs are in styles which can be recognized as belonging to the Paracas, Nazca, Tiwanaku, or Inca cultures.

Some of the images are of flowers, fish, or living animals of various sorts. Others appear to depict scenes which would be anachronistic in pre-Columbian art, such as dinosaurs, advanced medical works and maps.

Archaeological remains show evidence of Peruvian cultures going back for several thousand years. At some later stages, the whole of modern Peru was united into a single political and cultural unit, culminating in the Inca Empire, followed by the Spanish conquest. At other stages, areas such as the Ica Valley, a habitable region separated from others by desert, developed a distinctive culture of its own.


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