{"id":262,"date":"2014-06-30T16:12:26","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T22:12:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/?p=262"},"modified":"2019-07-11T22:36:41","modified_gmt":"2019-07-12T04:36:41","slug":"costa-ricas-balls-of-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/costa-ricas-balls-of-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Costa Rica’s stone balls join World Heritage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Costa Rica’s iconic stone spheres have been\u00a0recognized for their value to\u00a0World Heritage<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bringing\u00a0more international\u00a0attention to the southern region’s\u00a0mysterious past, as well as\u00a0its contentious future.<\/p>\n

No one\u00a0knows\u00a0who made a single one\u00a0of the preColombian\u00a0stone spheres,\u00a0let alone why more than 300\u00a0were sculpted to near geometric perfection more than 1,000 years ago. Like Stonehedge and Easter Island, the petrospheres have piqued archaeological inquiry and fantastical supposition since the first examples were\u00a0unearthed by banana plantation workers in the mid-19th century.<\/p>\n

Ranging in size from a child’s fist to a wrecking ball, some arrangements suggest that the spheres aligned with the stars or served\u00a0as\u00a0monumental compasses. Local lore has it that they were\u00a0the\u00a0playthings of a god hell-bent on controlling the weather, still\u00a0other theories contend they\u00a0make perfect instruments for ancient\u00a0alien air traffic control<\/a>. The truth is, no one really knows what the original sculptors had in mind or even exactly when they lived.<\/p>\n

The endurance of mystery may be\u00a0just another\u00a0reason for Las Bolas\u00a0to join UNESCO’s elite list of sites\u00a0thought to exemplify human heritage, so often defined by\u00a0desperately wanting to know, rather than actually knowing. Officially, the qualifying\u00a0criteria for the\u00a0sphere sites is that they “bear\u00a0a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or has disappeared.”<\/p>\n

(With La Sele’s historic upset advance to the finals of\u00a0the World Cup, we can bear witness to the fact that ball-centrist culture has anything by disappeared.)<\/p>\n

The stone balls of yore\u00a0were probably\u00a0hand-carved\u00a0by ancestors of the Boruca, T\u00e9ribe and Guaymi peoples in Southern Costa Rica. Some believe\u00a0ancients formed the\u00a0rocks by dissolving them with a\u00a0plant-based potion, though many\u00a0scholars refute this. The\u00a0exact timeline of production\u00a0is also a point of debate. Unlike organic materials,\u00a0rock cannot be carbon-dated. The approximate ages of the spheres are based on\u00a0associated materials, usually sediments and pottery shards found at the installation site, which indicate that they could have been made during an 1,800 year period.\u00a0(For some perspective: that’s considerably longer than the Spanish Monarchy\u00a0has even existed).<\/p>\n

Some of the bolas are thought to weigh more than 15 tons. Others have been pocketed and used as mantle decorations.\u00a0The UNESCO listing only applies to balls with a diameter of 70 cm or larger and its unclear how or if it will affect the many spheres that have been removed from Costa Rica. Of more than 300 recorded petrospheres found in the southern region about a dozen remain in their original context, according to\u00a0an\u00a0educated estimate by John W. Hoopes, an archaeologist whose research contributed to the UNESCO listing.<\/p>\n

“The\u00a0main that this listing does is draw worldwide global attention to this site and others. The conservation of the site is\u00a0ultimately the responsibility of the country in which its\u00a0found,” Hoopes said via Skype.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Most if not all “in situ” spheres left are at the four locations recognized as international patrimony by UNESCO this week:\u00a0Finca 6, Batamba, El Silencio and Grijalba 2. A new museum at Finca 6, a former banana plantation, gives the\u00a0public<\/a>\u00a0a chance to see the spheres as they were installed centuries ago.<\/p>\n

\"An
An ancient stone sphere in a new context at Plaza Democracia in San Jos\u00e9, Costa Rica. Of more than 300 known spheres, all but a dozen or so have been moved from their original locations in the southern zone.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The rampant damage\u00a0and dispersion of the spheres began after\u00a0United Fruit Company workers uncovered the first examples while clearing\u00a0banana fields in 1940. Since then many have been rolled into gullies and ravines. Others were burned and cracked by fire when land was cleared for plantations. Still others were dynamited, or sent to\u00a0faraway lands and used\u00a0as prized lawn ornaments. Paris has one, so does Harvard. Some were stolen, others sold to the highest bidder<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It seems the predominate human impulses upon encountering one of these testimonies to human heritage are to a)\u00a0dig it\u00a0up, b) roll it\u00a0away or c) blow it\u00a0up and hope gold falls out. (It doesn’t).<\/p>\n

The solid rock from which the spheres were sculpted\u00a0came\u00a0from the Talamanca Mountains and was probably naturally flooded to the lowlands down the\u00a0T\u00e9rraba River to the Diqu\u00eds valley, where boulders would have been\u00a0collected and transported\u00a0upwards of 50 miles to some installation sites.\u00a0Today the Diqu\u00eds valley\u00a0is the planned site for the\u00a0largest hydro-electric project ever\u00a0in Central America, a dam on the Superior General River between Buenos Aires, Osa, and P\u00e9rez Zeled\u00f3n. In the works under another name for more than 30 years, construction began in 2009, but was stalled in 2011 by a lawsuit over indigenous rights<\/a> and\u00a0remains\u00a0delayed by the construction of an associated pipeline. The El Diqu\u00eds project\u00a0would flood 6815 ha \u00a0(27 sq mi) to create\u00a0631 megawatts of power\u00a0for\u00a01 million consumers, many of them in Panama, according to the Institute for Costan Rican Electricity ICE<\/a>. It would inundate protected indigenous territories, displacing\u00a0at least\u00a01,500 people and “irremediably affecting” 150 archaeological sites, according to an impact summary<\/a> by the University of Costa Rica.<\/p>\n

For more context\u00a0about the World Heritage site designation, check out this article<\/a>\u00a0en espa\u00f1ol.<\/p>\n

\"President
President Solis poses with a stone sphere in San Jos\u00e9 after four archaeological sites in Southern Costa Rica were added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

-Emily Jo Cureton<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Costa Rica’s iconic stone spheres have been\u00a0recognized for their value to\u00a0World Heritage\u00a0by\u00a0the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), bringing\u00a0more international\u00a0attention to the southern region’s\u00a0mysterious past, as well as\u00a0its contentious future. No one\u00a0knows\u00a0who made a single one\u00a0of the preColombian\u00a0stone spheres,\u00a0let alone why more than 300\u00a0were sculpted to near geometric perfection more than 1,000 years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36,1],"tags":[11,77,85,74,21,84,80,82,81,83,78,79],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","category-uncategorized","tag-coolplaces","tag-diquis","tag-diquis-hydroelectric-project","tag-emily-jo-cureton","tag-history","tag-ice","tag-las-bolas","tag-osa","tag-stone-spheres","tag-terraba","tag-unesco","tag-world-heritage"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/bolas.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppNc8-4e","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":52,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1006,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/1006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.academiatica.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}