Guatemala's 'FAT BOYS' - A Pre-Columbian Mystery

The "Fat Boys" assembled in La Democracia and the turtle-head found at Izapa do not exhaust the examples of magnetic sculptures found in Soconusco, however. Among the assortment of stone carvings brought together in the open-air "museum" at the El Baúl sugar plantation in Guatemala are not only the third-oldest known Long Count inscription (of which more presently) but also at least two statues possessing magnetic properties.

One of these (discovered in 1979) depicts two men sitting cross-legged on a bench with their arms crossed on their chests. Both men have north magnetic poles where their arms cross, while under the bench upon which they sit are two south magnetic poles -- the pole below the man on the left, as one faces them, being more pronounced than that beneath the man on the right. Nearby, a well-fashioned likeness of a rampant jaguar was found to have north magnetic poles in both of its paws, but no discernible south poles. (This discovery came to light when another student assistant and I revisited the site in 1993.) Finally, a small humanoid sculpture situated in the plaza of the village of TuxtIa Chica near Izapa was found in 1983 to be magnetic in the right side of its head.

Thus, the mystery of magnetism in Soconusco remains just that: Because the 'Fat Boys" appear to have been the earliest of this collection of carvings, it seems that magnetism, however it was discovered, was first associated with human beings -- at least in the cluster of statues found in the Guatemalan piedmont. Later, and in a different part of Soconusco -- this time just over the present-day border in southern Mexico -- another sculptor fashioned a carving of a turtle's head having a magnetic field focused on its snout.

Does this mean that the local appreciation of magnetism had changed, or were the discoveries and associations of magnetism -- first with people and later with the turtle -- independent and unique? One can only continue to speculate. But what does seem certain, however, is that the property of magnetism had been identified in Soconusco, perhaps as early as 2000 B.C., but in any case well before the birth of Christ, and that it had been incorporated into the local statuary.