In newspapers and magazines, the curious could see more than one publication about the black stones of Ica and their collection, collected by Dr. Jeronimo Lewis de Cabrera from Toledo. Recently, thanks to the new work of Andrey Zhukov, Candidate of Historical Sciences, the Russian reading public for the first time was able to find out the details of how the campaign to discredit this collection began.
Ica stones prove that humanity is many millions of years older than commonly believed
The Jesuit missionary Father Simon, who accompanied the detachment of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro on the campaign of 1535, mentioned in his notes about engraved stones from the Peruvian Ica Valley. Information has been preserved that in 1562 several stones with engraved drawings were sent to Spain along with other objects of the Indian cultures of Peru.
In the 20th century, when the population of the Ica Valley increased significantly, stones began to be found more and more often. The first collectors of the collection of such stones in the fifties were the brothers Carlos and Pablo Soldi from the town, which, like the valley, is called Ica.
In 1966, one of his regular patients gave Dr. Cabrera a gift in the form of a black andesite stone engraved with the image of a strange fish. Learning that such stones are often found by local huqueros, that is, professional grave robbers, as well as local peasants, the doctor also began to collect such stones.
By local standards, the doctor paid for them very well, and by 1968 his collection consisted of 6,000 stones, from small, only a few centimeters in size, to one and a half meter boulders. At the same time, Cabrera developed a vigorous activity to popularize the collection. In an effort to interest the phenomenon of engraved stones in official science, he lectured and published articles in the media.
Thanks to this, Iki's black stones were learned in a short time not only in Peru, but also abroad. But the official science preferred to ignore them, because in addition to images of flowers and plants, scenes from the life of Indians and similar things, on the engravings one could sometimes find something completely incompatible with common scientific sense. Namely: animals that became extinct during the last ice age, scenes of human hunting for fossil lizards, as well as intricate surgical operations for heart and … brain transplantation. In the late sixties, heart transplant operations were just beginning to be mastered, but brain transplantation is not possible to this day.
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SENSATION FROM "MUNDIAL"
The silence of official science lasted for several years. In 1973 and 1974, the famous French writer and researcher of the ancient history of mankind, Robert Charroux, twice visited Dr. Cabrera and got acquainted with his collection.
Soon his book "The Mysteries of the Andes" was published in Paris, in which the idea was expressed that humanity is many millions of years older than it is commonly believed. Iki Sharru regarded the stones as one of the decisive proofs of this. And in December, the Express newspaper from the Peruvian capital of Lima published a review of this book and a series of six articles written by its journalists based on conversations with Dr. Cabrera. It was then that a powerful response followed.
In January 1975, the metropolitan magazine "Mundial" published an article devoid of the author's signature entitled "Made by Basilio Uchuya". Thirteen pages proved that the Ica stones were a modern forgery made by two peasants from the village of Okukahe: Basilio Uchuya and Irma Gutierras. The anonymous creation said that, having learned in advance the names of the manufacturers of the forgeries, Mundial sent a group of journalists to Okukakha. They found Don Basilio's wife, from whom they learned that he and Irma had been taken to the police to testify about the stones. Uchuya told the guards of order that he himself cut all the stones. Gutierras confirmed this. I must say that both Basilio and Irma had eight children, and for looting the tombs they were threatened with imprisonment for up to two years. Of course they were happy to admitthat they themselves made fake engraved stones and sold them to tourists and obsessed with collecting Javier Cabrera.
When a couple of peasants were released from the police, a series of absurdities began. Irma volunteered to show reporters where she found andesite stones. She took the journalists a couple of kilometers from their home and showed them the two-meter-deep pit. They asked her to conduct a control experiment. Gutierras took up a shovel and after an hour and a half of work removed from the ground a pebble the size of a tangerine and weighing half a kilo. Justifying herself, she stated that it is very difficult to find such pebble stones. She also claimed that 20 - 25 engraved stones the size of an orange could be made in a week. For each of them, Cabrera allegedly paid 20 - 25 soles.
Basilio said that he started making such stones in 1965, but in the past two years, due to lack of time, he has not engraved a single new one. The technology for making fakes, he said, looked very simple: he cut out the images with a knife, then coated the stones with clay to give them an ancient look, and then cleaned them and polished them with shoe wax. In his work, Uchuya allegedly used newspapers and textbooks depicting ancient animals as models. The material even included a photograph in which Basilio demonstrates a spread of a magazine with a picture of a dinosaur. In his written statement, Uchuya indicated that all the stones in Cabrera's collection were made by him, although a little earlier in the article, Irma Gutierras was quoted as saying that she also made stones for the doctor. The very possibility of engraving on andesite looks very doubtful,which is an Andean variety of granite, with a simple knife. After all, the strength of this stone is not inferior, and sometimes even surpasses the strength of ordinary steel.
LATE RECOGNITION
The official non-recognition of the Ica stones did not stop Dr. Cabrera. In April 1976, he published his book "The Message of the Engraved Stones of Ica", in which he gave a general description of the collection and his concept of prehistoric humanity. He became friends with the famous ufologist Erich von Daniken, who in one of his works devoted much space to describing the doctor's collection. Von Daniken also met Basilio Uchuya. The latter admitted to the Swiss ufology grandee that he produced engraved stones, and some of them are indeed in the collection of Dr. Cabrera. But now he said that he had made no more than 200 forgeries for sale, imitating genuine samples of stones. At the same time, according to the peasant, he told buyers when selling that he was offering imitation.
Later, the American researcher Dennis Swift also met Basilio Uchuya, who visited Peru eight times specifically to study the black stones of Ica. According to him, Basilio was illiterate. He was violently involved in the story of the discrediting of the Cabrera collection. He was simply given a choice: a prison for the sale of ancient artifacts or a confession in the manufacture of forgeries. Of course, he chose the latter. The peasant admitted to Swift that in order to earn money by selling souvenirs, he made fake stones, but no more than five or six per month, since this work is very time consuming. He could easily depict a bus or an airplane next to a dinosaur and often carved his initials on the stones, so that his products differed from the originals not only by the engraving technique.
Uchuya told the guards of order that he himself cut all the stones.
Finally, in September 2002, Peruvian friends introduced Spanish explorers Felix Mariscal and Maria del Carmen to the nearly seventy-year-old Uchuya. In a book published five years later, they made it clear that the large Uchuya family had long been a clan of hereditary huqueros. After a week of intimate communication, backed up by hefty portions of the local pisco liqueur, old Basilio revealed that he did make fake stones and even had an artist's diploma. But at the same time, he was engaged in unauthorized excavations for decades. At the same time, he found many engraved stones, including images of dinosaurs, medical and astronomical scenes. Basilio Uchuya himself, according to him, is sure that in ancient times, people and dinosaurs in this territory coexisted together.