Santiago

The Ica Stones

From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.