When it comes to the stone heads of ancient America, knowledgeable people mainly recall the unusual heads of the Olmec civilization that existed on the territory of present-day Mexico in the period 1500 BC. e. - 400 BC e.
These heads, first of all, attract attention to themselves with unexpectedly negroid facial features - full lips, wide noses, etc.
However, the Olmecs were not the only ones in the region to create such sculptures. An unknown ancient culture, living nearby on the territory of modern Guatemala more than 2 thousand years ago, also carved sculptures, including heads, from stone.
Almost nothing is known about this people, since their culture mixed with the Mayan culture and at first their sculptures were also attributed to the Mayan culture. However, later archaeologists figured out that the unusual "pot-bellied" and more primitive style of these sculptures definitely points to completely different cultural traditions.
In the English-speaking environment, this culture is called "potbelly" and among all the artifacts left from them, giant stone heads are the most interesting. In style, they are not at all similar to the Olmec heads (although some historians claim that the "pot-bellied" ones simply adopted this culture from the Olmecs) and are made in less detail.
The eyes of the stone heads of the "pot-bellied" ones are often closed, as if they are sleeping or grieving, and the features of their faces are more like Indian, and not Negroid like among the Olmecs.
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Sometimes, in the form of a rounded ball, not only the head was cut out, but the whole body of a person as a whole.
In the 1970s, 11 of these stone sculptures were brought from different parts of Guatemala and installed in a row in the town of La Democracy as a kind of museum exhibit.
Recently, a research team led by scientists from Harvard decided to examine these heads with magnetometers and recorded an incomprehensible magnetic anomaly. This is reported by Live Science.
The researchers were going to create a magnetic map of the surface of these sculptures and for this purpose used a portable scanning magnetometer, as well as a hand-held magnetometer. Magnetic anomalies were found in 10 out of 11 heads, and in 6 of them they were very powerful.
The most interesting thing is that these anomalies were located in the place where the cheeks or navels were cut in the sculptures.
According to one of the researchers' versions, these anomalies could arise from lightning strikes even when the sculptures were just stones on the ground. However, the ancient carvers were definitely aware of these magnetic anomalies and deliberately chose such stones. And when they created their sculptures, for some reason they carved out some parts of the bodies precisely in the places where the anomalies were concentrated.
All this in general indicates that the ancient culture of Guatemala knew about the nature of magnetism and, perhaps, found it with the help of a special stone suspended from a string.