Dismissed as fakes for a century, enigmatic Puerto Rican stones could rewrite history

For more than a century, the fist-sized rocks etched with enigmatic patterns were ignored by academics and shunned by cultural power brokers.

Discovered in Puerto Rico in the 1880s by a priest who was convinced they were a link to one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the stones were declared forgeries in the early 1900s by researchers from the Smithsonian Institution.

And so the rocks languished — literally collecting dust.

When Puerto Rican archaeologist Reniel Rodríguez Ramos first stumbled onto the collection in 2001, the artifacts were so unappreciated that one was being used as a doorstop.

“These stones were considered garbage,” Rodríguez recalls. “They were getting no love from any institution or even any archaeologist in Puerto Rico.”

But now the rocks, known as Las Piedras del Padre Nazario, or Father Nazario’s Stones, are undergoing a radical reevaluation. Not only is there growing evidence that they’re genuine antiquities, there are also clues that they might represent a lost language — a finding that could rewrite the island’s pre-Columbian history.

Standing in his cramped lab at the University of Puerto Rico’s Utuado Campus, Rodríguez puts one of the stones under a magnifying glass and describes the figure he sees chiseled into its surface. It seems to be the profile of a man wearing something akin to a turban. Lines curving around the stone’s surface are pocked with small symbols.

Rodríguez has identified about 20 symbols that repeat across the more than 300 stones he’s studied. Initially, he thought the angles and sloping lines might be astronomical information, a guide to the cosmos.