Ica stones

Common card · No. 486486

The Ica stones are a collection of andesite stones with engraved motifs created as a work of art in the 1960s by Peruvian farmer Basilio Uchuya and others in the Ica Province. The artifacts, many of which notably depict non-avian dinosaurs and modern technology in a style imitating Mesoamerican art, were originally sold as having genuine pre-Columbian origin, before Uchuya and other farmers admitted to having created them for profit, leading some to describe the stones as hoaxes. Stones with engraved artwork were first reported in Peru in the middle sixteenth century during the Spanish conquest. Subsequent archaeological finds have been next to non-existent, though huaqueros (grave robbers) at some point prior to the 1960s began selling stones similar to the Ica stones. The modern set of stones was first popularized in the 1960s and 1970s. The most widely known collection of stones, numbering around 20,000 individual objects, belonged to the physician Javier Cabrera Darquea. Cabrera purchased...

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