(this material is an exerpt from the book "The Message of the Stones", by Dr. Javier Cabrera)
(EXERPT #3)
At this point in my investigations I must confess I was surprising myself at every turn. The engraved stones of Ica were revolutionizing paleontology and radically changing the date of the appearance of culture and intelligent men on earth. One question remained: Was it possible that the engraved stones of Ica were somehow being manufactured by modern man? I remembered the assertion made by the Director of the Museo Regional of Ica that the peasants of Ocucaje were making them. The assertion strained credulity, since these are simple people who totally lack the specialized understanding of science that can be seen in the stones. Possibly the stones were not manufactured by peasants but by one or two men who did possess such understanding and who had the stones carved with the intention of selling them. Despite the fact that I knew from Herman Buse’s account that these stones had been sold since 1961 for very little, amounts that would not even come close to compensating the enormous trouble they cost, I decided that I must have laboratory confirmation of the age of the stones.
THE LABORATORY CONFIRMS THE STONES' ANTIQUITY
It was in the month of May, l967, and one day I selected from my collection 33 stones, among them a few that showed the reproductive cycle of long-extinct animals, which I knew would be controversial if their authenticity could not be established.
I went to my friend Luis Hochshild, a learned mining engineer and Vice-President of the Mauricio Hochshild Mining Co., based in Lima. I asked if his laboratories could perform an analysis that would determine the nature of the stone and the antiquity of the engravings. At the beginning of June I received a report from the laboratory, in a document signed by the geologist Eric Wolf which stated:
This is unquestionably natural stone shaped by fluvial transport (river rock).
Petrologically I would classify them as andesites. Andesites are rocks whose components have been subjected mechanically to great pressure which causes chemical changes to take place. In this case the effects of intense sericitation (transformation of feldspar into sericite) are obvious. This process has increased the compactness and specific weight, also creating the smooth surface that ancient artists preferred for carving.
I will try to confirm this preliminary opinion by means of a more detailed test in the laboratories of the Engineering School and of the University of Bonn, West Germany.
The stones are covered with a fine patina of natural oxidation which also covers the engravings by which their age should be able to be deduced.
I have not been able to find any notable or irregular wear on the edges of the incisions which leads me to suspect that these incisions or etchings were executed not long before being deposited in the graves or other places where they were discovered.
Lima, 8 June 1967.
Eric Wolf
This analysis revealed three important facts: a) The engraved stones have a highier specific gravity than common river rocks found in riverbeds and beaches, which I had guessed as soon as I first held one in my hand; b) The engravings are old, to judge by the coating of natural oxidation that covers the incisions as well as the stones themselves; and c) The stones were engraved not long before being deposited in the spots where they were found, to judge by the absence of wear on the edges of the incisions, which means that the stones were not engraved for utilitarian or even artistic purposes, but rather to be deposited in a safe place - for some unknown reason.
One year before, Santiago Agurto Calvo had published the results of a petrological analysis of the engraved stones in his collection. These results were part of the newspaper article mentioned earlier, in which he discussed the discovery of engraved stones in the Ocucaje zone. Specifically, the article dealt with some specimens that he had purchased in 1962 from huaqueros which, according to him, contained "unidentifiable things, insects, fish, birds, cats, fabulous creatures and human beings, sometimes apart and other times shown together in elaborate and fantastic compositions". He had entrusted the analysis to the mining Faculty of the Universidad Nacional de Ingeneira and it had been performed by two engineers, Fernando de las Casas and Cesar Sotillo. Since the analysis I had commissioned promised that the preliminary study would be followed up by a closer examination in the laboratories of the Universidad Nacional de Ingeneira de Peru and the University of Bonn, I decided to compare the analysis of my stones with that of the stones of Agurto. The analysis of Agurto's stones read:
All the stones are highly carbonized andesites, despite their coloration and texture, which suggest a different nature.
The stones come from lava flows dating from the Mesozoic era, characteristic of the zone where they were found.
The surface has weathered, and feldspar has been turned into clay, weakening the surface and forming a kind of shell around the interior of the stones.
This shell measures an average of grade 3 on the Mohs scale (which measures the comparative capacity of a substance to scratch another or be scratched by another) and up to 4 1/2 in the part not so affected by weathering. The stones can be worked with any hard material such as bone, shell, obsidian, etc., and naturally, by any prehispanic metal implement.
As he says in his article, Agurto Calvo specified in his instructions to the laboratory that he wished to know the hardness of the stones. He thought that if they were very hard it would have been impossible for them to have been carved by prehispanic man (Incas and Pre-Incas), since these people did not have hard metal inplements. If the laboratory confirmed that the stones could have been carved with the tools known to prehispanic man, which it did, Agurto was prepared to conclude that they were indeed of prehispanic origin.
Agurto, following in the traditional path of Peruvian archeology, which does not admit the possibility of an advanced culture earlier than the well known prehispanic cultures, assumed that Peruvian prehistory extends only as far back as the Incas and the Pre-Incas. This explains why he ignored various clues he had to hand that could have led him to suspect the existence of a more distant cultural horizon in Peru. I refer to the laboratory tests he solicited, which show that the stones come from lava flows pertaining to the Mesozoic era, characteristic of Ocucaje, where the stones were found. We know that Mesozoic rocks date from 230 million years ago. And although this date is far removed from the accepted date of the appearance of man on earth (250,000 years ago), it is not scientific to dismiss the possibility that the engraved stones are evidence of the existence of man in a previous, unknown past. He was also led to ignore the implications of the "unidentifiable things"... engraved on the stones and mentioned in his own article. Scientific dogma regarding the living things which inhabited the earth in the different geological eras should have alerted Agurto that such "fabulous figures and human beings... shown together in elaborate and fantastic compositions", were not products of the imagination of the men who carved them, but represented real animals that long ago lived on the earth.
Both sets of laboratory results fit in with my own observations; everything pointed to the possibility that man coexisted with prehistoric animals. At the very least, it seemed clear that the stones had unusual archeological significance.