Message #148716

[Bianca]

Of course, the enigma posed by the "Fat Boys" is really a double barreled one. First, we must ask if their sculptors were actually aware of their magnetic property, and, if so, how they might have initially recognized it, especially in the presumed absence of iron. Or, on the other hand, might not the localization of magnetic poles within these sculptures have been simply a matter of chance? And second, if the magnetic property of each of these stones was indeed known, what prompted their sculptors to associate this mystical force with such localized parts of the body as the right temple and the navel?

               Even if it does not take one magnet to detect another, at least it requires a sensitized piece of iron, such as the needle of a compass, to do so. Greek sources credit Thales of Miletus with having discovered the property of magnetism about 600 B.C., and the Chinese author Fu Chin mentions "a stone which can give a needle its direction" in a manuscript dating from 121 B.C. Yet, the Mesoamerican cultures, to the best of our knowledge, remained innocent of the use of metals until at least as late as the ninth or tenth century of the Christian era. Even then their acquaintance appears to have been limited to such metals as copper, silver, and gold, all of which have a lustrous appearance. Thus, how a Stone Age people familiar with chipping their primary tools and weapons out of materials like flint and obsidian stumbled onto the presence of magnetic iron ore in basalt boulders remains a mystery.

               The most likely explanation which suggests itself is that the stone carver or sculptor may have noticed the attraction and/or adhesion of fine dust particles to the surface of the monument as he was cutting and polishing it. Naturally his curiosity would have been aroused as he observed that small fragments of the material he was working on were being drawn back to the stone from which he was trying to remove them. A less likely scenario for the discovery of magnetism might have been the chance placement of two small iron-rich boulders close to one another, causing them either to attract or repel one another depending on their polarity.

               Whichever of these hypothetical reconstructions we favor, central to both of them is the notion of a stone carver working with a basalt boulder that is endowed with significant local concentrations of magnetite. Let us assume for the moment that, however the property of magnetism was first discovered in Mesoamerica, it is now known.

The question which confronts us next is how and why it ever became associated with the right temple of the head or with the navel. What imaginative belief or line of reasoning impelled a stone carver to shape a carving of a head in such fashion that the magnetic lines of force came to a focus both above and below the figure's right ear? Or, when carving a massively rotund body, to make sure to position his subject in such a way that the magnetic lines of force entered and exited on either side of the figure's navel?

Surely the sculptors' conscious repetition of this orientation in statue after statue cannot have been any more a matter of chance than if all the sculptures had been hit by lightning in precisely these same places. Clearly, something in the early Soconuscan culture seems to have dictated a linkage between the right temple and magnetism and between the navel and magnetism. What was it?