The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica

The Stone Spheres of Costa Rica are one of the strangest mysteries in archaeology. It was discovered in the Diquis Delta, also known as the Sierpe, Diquís, and General Rivers, near the towns of Palmar Sur and Palmar Norte.

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 many tons in weight; 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 likely made by the ancestors of native peoples who lived in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest. The Ball Stones can also be found as ubiquitous status symbols adorning the homes and gardens of the rich and powerful.

These objects are not natural in origin and are different from the stone balls in Jalisco, Mexico, that were described in a 1965 National Geographic article. These stone balls were 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 being spherical in shape, they were further abridged by pecking and hammering with stones made of similar hard material. The spheres are usually attributed to the extinct Diquís culture and are sometimes referred to as the Diquís Spheres. They 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 that 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 be found in the bed of the Térraba River and were 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 speculation since the publication of Erich von Däniken’s Chariots in 1971.

In recent times, they have gained massive attention in many books and have been featured on television, radio, in magazines, and on 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 by experts since they first came to light during agricultural activities by the United Fruit Company in 1940,

In the 1950s, 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, destroyed 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 them with sand. The placement of the spheres was of great significance because the carving was quarried many miles away.

The labor required to transport it testifies 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 from millennia ago. Source: Wikipedia