The Atlantis Blueprint (21 page)

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Using Posnansky’s methodology but armed with better instruments, Steede established a more reliable date.

I
N THE EARLY
1930s, the United Fruit Company began clearing the jungles of south-western Costa Rica, in Central America, to make a banana plantation in the area called the Diquis Delta. The workers hacking and burning their way through jungle began to find huge stone hemispheres sticking up out of the earth, and some hard digging revealed that they were spheres, like giant beachballs – except that they were made of granite. The largest was over 9 feet in diameter, the smallest the size of a tennis ball. It seemed that the spheres had once formed part of various religious sites: they had been supported on top of mounds, and were surrounded by stelae and statues. What was so astonishing was the perfect workmanship; many were exact spheres, and their surface was as smooth as paper.

While giant stone balls are certainly an oddity, something about them quickly exhausts one’s curiosity. Some of the wealthier inhabitants of San José and Limon, Costa Rica’s major cities, had them transported on to their front lawns, and learned in the process that the largest weighed 20 tons. A few
archaeologists looked at them, shook their heads, and opined that they probably represented either the sun or the moon, or perhaps both, and turned their attention elsewhere.

About a decade later, an American archaeologist called Samuel K. Lothrop was spending a brief vacation in the Diquis area with his wife when he saw one of the balls on a lawn in Palmar Sur; he was told that there were hundreds of them, and that no one had any idea of what they were. Here was a puzzle worth solving. Since Lothrop happened to have time on his hands – bandits were making it difficult to continue his current task of excavating the pottery of the Chortega – he decided to devote some time to this intriguing problem.

He made little headway, for a smooth stone ball is devoid of clues, but at least he visited the site where some of the balls had been left in place and noted that they often seemed to be found in threes, in the form of a triangle. Others occurred in straight lines consisting of as many as forty-five spheres. But the triangles were oddly irregular, and were often made of balls of differing sizes, which suggested a special purpose in their arrangement, some hidden code that remained impossible to fathom. Lothrop wrote a paper on the stone balls, which was published under the auspices of the Peabody Institute at Harvard, and returned to less impenetrable mysteries. No other archaeologist pursued the subject, for Lothrop seemed to have exhausted it in his brief paper.

Three decades passed, and the stone spheres seemed to have been forgotten. Then, in 1981, Ivar Zapp, a young Professor of Architecture at the University of Costa Rica, thought he saw a new approach to the mystery. His inspiration came from the work of an English scholar, John Michell, whose name had become associated with ‘ley lines’ – long, straight tracks that run like canals across the English countryside. Zapp recalled the long, straight lines of stone spheres in the Diquis Delta, and began to speculate…
¹

Ley lines had been ‘discovered’ in 1921 by an English businessman named Alfred Watkins, who was riding his horse
across the hills near Bredwardine, in Herefordshire, when he noticed that ancient footpaths ran straight as an arrow for mile after mile, often towards hilltops. It suddenly struck him that England seems to be criss-crossed with hundreds of these ‘old straight tracks’. He called them ‘leys’ or ‘leas’, and concluded that they were ancient trade routes used by the earliest inhabitants of Britain.
²

When John Michell approached the problem in the mid-1960s, it was largely because he was fascinated by the mystery of flying saucers, which had been causing excitement ever since a businessman named Kenneth Arnold had seen a formation of them flying at tremendous speed near Mount Rainier in Washington State in 1947. Subsequently there had been thousands of sightings.

Michell noted the curious fact that many flying saucers were seen close to ley lines, which are obviously more easily seen from the air than the ground, and especially at the crossing points of several leys. Learning that the Chinese have similar lines called
lung mei,
or dragon paths, which are designed to channel the ‘magic energies of heaven and earth’, Michell speculated that ley lines may mark some current of ‘earth-force’. He learned that dowsers, for example, can detect ley lines by the response of their dowsing rods or pendulums, and noted that ley lines often pass through ‘holy’ sites, such as burial mounds, old churches, and ancient monuments like Stonehenge.

Ivar Zapp could see that the stone balls of the Diquis Delta seemed to pose some of the same questions as the megaliths of Stonehenge – or, for that matter, the huge stones of the Great Pyramid. How were they carved so perfectly? How were they moved? Some of them were even found high in the mountains along the coast of Costa Rica, and it was impossible to imagine even a large team of men rolling them uphill – it would be too difficult and dangerous.

Zapp took a party of students to the Diquis Delta to try to fathom the mystery of the spheres. They were baffled, but he
began to see a gleam of light. Lothrop had left diagrams of what many of the original stones had looked like before they were moved to museums and front lawns, and Zapp noted that two groups seemed to be arranged on either side of a straight line that pointed directly at the magnetic North Pole. In that case, he wondered, was it possible that the other sides of the triangles were directed towards points on the earth?

When he tried out this theory on a map, extending the lines with a ruler, the result was disappointing. The lines seemed to point at nothing in particular, although that could be explained by the fact that a map is a flat projection of the curved surface of the earth. Zapp tried again, this time with a tape measure and a globe. One line, projected from Palmar Sur, where spheres had been found, went straight through Cocos Island, then through the Galapagos Islands, then to Easter Island. He recalled that similar spheres had been discovered on Easter Island, although they were smaller than the giant balls of Costa Rica.

When he looked more closely at this ‘sight line’ from Palmar Sur to Easter Island, he saw that the line actually missed Easter Island by 42 miles. Then he remembered that Polynesian sailors can detect the presence of an island up to 70 miles away by studying the waves and the clouds, for both are disturbed by the presence of land; sailors also note the presence of land-based birds such as the tern and the noddy. A 7,000-mile-long sight line, passing through two other islands, that missed Easter Island by only 42 miles would be regarded as a hit.

His observations received confirmation as he studied other sight lines. Another side of the same triangle extended across the Atlantic and led to the Straits of Gibraltar. In another group of stones the line led to the Great Pyramid. And in yet another, it not only pointed to southern England, but ran right through Stonehenge. That could hardly be chance.

It seemed that Ivar Zapp had discovered the purpose of the stone balls of Costa Rica: they were navigational aids. That
explained why some were in straight lines, and some were in the mountains overlooking the sea, and also why more of the stone balls had been found on the island of Cano, off the south coast of Costa Rica, looking across the Pacific.

Lothrop had also noted that the balls were often found in association with native cemeteries, which led to the speculation that they might be some kind of homage to the dead, although it makes sense for direction markers to be found in such locations, since the sailors would hope for guidance from the spirits of dead navigators.

The question of when the spheres were carved remains a matter for debate. Archaeological finds in the Diquis Delta date from 12,000
BC
to
AD
500. Some archaeologists date the stone balls to the most recent period, between a few centuries
BC
and
AD
500. Archaeologists tend to be conservative, and extreme caution in dating a new find is a way of showing that you are a sober and respectable member of the academic community, not likely to leap to wild conclusions. This can be a mistake. In the 1920s, when the Meso-American archaeologist Matthew W. Stirling found an immense negroid head at Tres Zapotes in Mexico, he suggested that the Olmec culture that carved it might be dated as early as 600
BC,
and was greeted with hoots of derision from his academic colleagues. Stirling was, in fact,
too
conservative, and the Zapotec culture is now known to date from 1,200
BC.
So it is also possible that the giant stone balls are another proof of Hapgood’s ‘worldwide maritime civilisation’ of 7,000
BC.

Zapp knew Hapgood’s
Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings,
and was perfectly aware of his hypothesis. A student named Humberto Carro noted that the story of Sinbad the Sailor in
The Arabian Nights
had a description of a steering device called a kamal, a long knotted cord with wooden squares at either end, the knots representing the latitudes of various ports. The Arab navigator would hold a certain knot between his teeth and point the string at the Pole Star to determine the ship’s position.

The kamal, a steering device consisting of a long, knotted cord with wooden squares at either end.

Zapp had seen this knotted string before, on a small figure Lothrop had found near a group of stone balls. It was holding the ends of the string in either hand and its centre was in its mouth, creating a V shape. Zapp had seen similar figures from places all over the world, from pottery designs in pre-Inca burial sites in Peru to depictions in the Indus Valley in India.

Costa Rica is, of course, a navigator’s culture, since it is on one of the narrowest parts of Central America, with two vast oceans on either side. Humberto Carro came upon another interesting piece of evidence, an article by Thor Heyerdahl that explained the techniques of sailing balsa rafts against the wind and current. Thousands of years before the keel was invented, Peruvians used removable centre-boards that served as keels and enabled them to tack. In the sixteenth century, Francisco Pizarro had encountered a whole flotilla of such rafts off the coast of Peru. They were of enormous size and moving towards them against the wind and current. Pizarro learned that they made journeys on these rafts along the whole coast of South America. Heyerdahl, we recall, used a similar
raft called
Kon-Tiki
3 to prove that ancient mariners could have crossed the Pacific; later on, he reinforced the point by crossing the Atlantic from Egypt to America.

When Christopher Columbus landed in Costa Rica in 1502, on his fourth voyage across the Atlantic, the explorers were received with great respect by the natives, and taken on a two-hour trek to the grave of an important person, which was decorated with the prow of a ship. The natives of Costa Rica appeared to be introducing these great navigators from Spain to one of their own famous navigators. The stone lapidas, or funeral slabs, upon which the dead man was laid out looked like the centre-boards of the Peruvian balsa rafts, and other figures – who seemed to be priests and kings – were laid out on identical centre-boards, stone replicas of the boards that played such an important part in their lives.

Could primitive navigators have sailed such enormous distances? Heyerdahl seemed to have proved the point, but he knew Easter Island was there when he set off. Would central American sailors of – let us say – 5,000
BC
even have known of its existence? And even if they had, would they have dared to launch a balsa raft into the vast and empty Pacific Ocean?

Zapp came upon a book that answered his question:
We, The Navigators
by David Lewis, published in 1972,
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in which Lewis described sailing with native islanders on native craft all over the Pacific, over 13,000 nautical miles. The islanders used the ocean lore they had learned from their forefathers. Lewis also described ‘sighting stones’ throughout the Pacific – he personally saw the sighting stones of Tonga and the Gilbert Islands. Unlike the stone balls of Costa Rica, these were flat slabs of coral (which you might expect from islands with plenty of coral), and they were also set in groups of three, which Lewis said were intended to ‘indicate the bearings of islands’. The stones had another use. The eldest child of each family was taught to use them to learn star patterns. They learned by heart the various stars that aligned themselves with the ‘stones’ at various times of the year, and continued to do
this over a lifetime, passing the knowledge on to their own children. Navigation came as naturally to these seafaring peoples as reading a road atlas does to a modern motorist.

Zapp noted the similarities between Meso-American, Polynesian and Greek astronomy. Zapp knew that ‘atl’ is not a Greek syllable, but that it comes from the Mayan and Nahuatl languages of Central America and means ‘water’. Atlahuac was the patron god of Tenochtitlan, the city the Aztecs built on a lake – now called Mexico City. Plato’s sunken civilisation was called Atlantis, and its major city was circular and ringed with canals, like some of the ancient cities of Central America. Was it possible that Atlantis was actually America? This is the startling argument that Ivar Zapp and his co-author George Erikson present in their book
Atlantis in America
(1998).
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