Tuesday, 21 June 2016

The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica

The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica is one of strangest mysteries in archaeology was discovered in the Diquis Delta also known as the Sierpe, Diquís, and General River, near the towns of Palmar Sur and Palmar Norte. The hundreds of stone balls have been discovered ranging in size from a few centimeters to more than two meters in diameter. More than 300 stone balls are monolithic sculptures made with human hands. Almost all of them are made of granodiorite a hard, igneous stone. They are in many tons in weighing; the largest ones weigh over 16 tons. These days, people decorate official buildings, hospitals and schools and even find them in museums as well. The stone balls were most expected made by the ancestors of native peoples who lived in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest. The Ball Stones can also find them as ubiquitous status symbols adorning the homes and gardens of the rich and powerful.

These objects are not natural in origin, different the stone balls in Jalisco, Mexico that was described in a 1965 National Geographic article.  These stone balls probably made by reducing round boulders to a spherical shape through a combination of controlled fracture, pecking, and grinding. The stone balls could have been roughed out through the application of heat and cold. When they were close to spherical in shape, they were further abridged by pecking and hammering with stones made of the similar hard material. The spheres are usually attributed to the extinct Diquís culture and are sometimes referred to as the Diquís Spheres have been placed in lines along the approach to the houses of chiefs, but their exact implication remains indeterminate. So nobody knows for what purpose to make these stone balls. Therefore, various myths surround the stones, such as they came from Atlantis, or that they were made as such by nature. Because no one has been able to demonstrate that gabbro, the material from which most of the balls are sculpted, can be worked this way. As early as 1948, the Spheres were deteriorating due to exposure to temperature changes, water damage from rain and irrigation.

The Stone Spheres can found from the bed of the Térraba River, where easily transported by natural processes from sources of parent material in the Talamanca mountains. Interestingly unfinished stone balls were never found there. The stone balls of Costa Rica have been the object of pseudoscientific speculations since the publication of Erich von Däniken’sChariots in 1971. In recent times, they have gained massive attention in many books; have been featured on television, radio, magazines, and web pages, where they do an unbelievable disservice to the public by misrepresenting themselves and the state of actual knowledge about these objects. Although the fact is that they have been recognized to experts since they first came to light during agricultural activities by the United Fruit Company in 1940.

In 1950’s, archaeological excavations undertaken at sites with stone balls found them to be associated with pottery and other materials typical of the Pre-Columbian cultures of southern Costa Rica. These stone balls have been endangered, by destroyed dynamited by treasure hunters or cracked and broken for agricultural activities. They appear to have been made by hammering natural boulders with other rocks, then polishing with sand. The placement of the Spheres was of great significance were carved was quarried many miles away. The labor required to transport it testify to a highly advanced society. Thus, a sense of inviolability and ritual permeates places where the Spheres were initially placed. It is even possible that they are an earthly map of the night sky millennia past. www.charismaticplanet.com
 

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