As modest Gaia circles Great Sun, revolving on her tilted axis — Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere of our Earth ball — consider stone spheres. Stone spheres — ancient artifacts of ceremonial or ritual purposes. Perhaps so, this and more. For this Solar-Lunar-Earthling journey, three examples: Costa Rica, Scotland, Oregon’s Fort Rock basin.
In Alajuela, a few miles northwest of Costa Rica’s capital San José, this massive stone sphere relocated from from SW Costa Rica’s Diquís region. Photo D. Beauchamp, 2003. Two colonial ironies (per wiki): “The culture of the people who made them disappeared after the Spanish conquest.” “The spheres were discovered in the 1930s as the United Fruit Company was clearing the jungle for banana plantations.” Many have been relocated over the past decade for decor or for preservation. Now, Stone Spheres are one of Costa Rica's National Symbols.
Basalt balls, Fort Rock basin, southeastern Oregon, 2.5-3.5", est. more than 3000 ybp. Photo in Jenkins (2004), see Notes.
Basalt spheres, about 2.4-6”, from Christmas Valley, southeastern Oregon, now in a private collection, photo Henry C. Koerper, in Sutton and Koerper (2005), see Notes.
Carved stone ball, Scotland. Neolithic, about 3000 ybp. Displayed at Kilmartin Museum, Argyll, western Scotland. photo D. Beauchamp, 2019.
Carved stone balls in the British museum, from Aberdeenshire, NE Scotland. In British Museum, photos D. Beauchamp, 2014.
NOTES
Costa Rica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_spheres_of_Costa_Rica
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1453
Oregon
— Dennis L. Jenkins, The Grasshopper and the Ant: Middle Holocene Occupations and Storage Behavior at the Bowling Dune Site in the Fort Rock Basin, Oregon in Early and Middle Holocene Archaeology of the Northern Great Basin, Edited by Dennis L. Jenkins, Thomas J. Connolly, and C. Melvin Aikens, 2004
— Mark Q. Sutton and Henry C. Koerper, The Middle Holocene Western Nexus: An Interaction Sphere between Southern California and the Northwestern Great Basin (2005), pp 5-10. https://pcas.org/v41n23.htm
Scotland
— Carved stone balls, British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1930-0412-2
TWO POEMS
10.
Objects
They live beside us.
We don't know them, they don't know us.
Sometimes they talk with us.
—Octavio Paz, from the poem Object Lesson in Loose Stones (1955), trans. Eliot Weinberger
xi
These bones brilliant in the night,
these words like precious stones
In the living throat of a petrified bird,
this beloved green,
this hot lilac,
this heart alone mysterious.
—Alejandra Pizarnik, from Diana’s Tree (Árbol de Diana) (1962), trans Anna Deeny
