The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica

Intro

One of the strangest mysteries in archaeology was discovered in the Diquis Delta of Costa Rica. Since the 1930s, hundreds of stone balls have been documented, ranging in size from a few centimeters to over two meters in diameter. Some weigh 16 tons. Almost all of them are made of granodiorite, a hard, ingenous stone. These objects are monolithic sculptures made by human hands.

The spheres number over 300. The large ones weigh many tons. Today, they decorate official buildings such as the Asamblea Legislativa, hospitals, and schools. You can find them in museums. The spheres were previously unknown to the inhabitants and they could offer no explanation of who made them or how old they were. Plantation workers bulldozed them and largely ignored them until rumors started spreading that they may contain gold or precious jewels. Many balls were drilled or cracked open with dynamite, only to reveal that they were composed of soil rock.

When news of these rock balls reached the authorities, several whole specimens and parts of the fractured balls were taken to the National Museum in San Jose. Here, they attracted the attention of Doris Stone, daughter of a United Fruit executive, who photographed them and wrote an article about the phenomenon in the 1943 edition of American Antiquity.

Since then, archaeologists have been perplexed by the stones. Thousands have now been found. Some are as small as four inches -- while others are as massive as eight feet in diameter. Estimates of their age goes back some 1,600 years, yet no one can be sure how they were made, by who or why.

Myths

The spherical stones certainly took a long time to make. The age of these stones place them at a time when no iron tools were known to exist in that region, meaning the spheres were somehow formed by stone implements. Yet no stone tools of this era and geographic are have been found.

All of this has lead some researchers to speculate that the stone spheres were made by some advanced civilization.

Some local legends tell of a magic potion that was able to make the rock soften and hence easily manipulated. This same legend persists to explain other phenomenon such as the precisely carved and fitted stones of Machu Pichu. One legend says that the spheres were formed around a coffee bean or nuggets of gold.

Other legends claim that the spheres were part of a game, once played by giants that inhabited the Earth or that the spheres represent stars of constellations in the sky.

Many of the spheres are made of granite like rock. The closest granite quarries of similar rock are in the Talamanca Mountain some 50 miles away. Although the stones could have been transported down the nearby Terraba River, no unfinished stones or evidence of excavation in the mountains has ever been found.

The construction of the spheres would have required a high degree of measurement and mathematics. One perplexing question is why this same level of skill and precision has not been found in any other artifacts of this region or era.