The Dilemma of the Fuente Magna Bowl


The journey to understand prehistory will, I would guess, go on forever. I wish I would live forever to follow all that is discovered and argued about. My Face Book scroll introduced me to the "Fuente Magna." This refers to a quite large and heavy bowl found in Bolivia by a farmer in 1950. The farmer thought it strange but needed a container just that size to water his pigs, so he used it that way for several years. Eventually, it was found and moved to a museum in Bolivia where it sat unnoticed for decades. Someone interested in ancient artifacts eventually spotted it and the conflicting theories about its origin began.

What set off the different theories are the many inscriptions that remain in the face of the bowl. The Face Book page provided the views of people who sounded knowledgeable about ancient artifacts and inscriptions. These sources forcefully advanced the theory the inscriptions, while not understood, resemble well the inscriptions of societies of what is now Iran but date back several thousand years. The carbon dating of the bowl material is thousands of years also. The native societies of Bolivia and nearby areas, Incas, etc. go back to only 500 or so CE. Thus, the Face Book sources think the vessel had to have been moved from the Middle East by some group during prehistoric times. But the route and method of moving it involved now sunken land masses. This theory is fascinating and exotic.

A page for Fuente Magna, however, debunks the above theory of origin. It suggests the bowl is a hoax. It states simply the bowl inscriptions are random marks made by unknown but recent persons. That is, the laboriously carved inscriptions are meaningless. Everyone acknowledges there were many different religious beliefs among the indigenous people including several gods and perhaps the inscriptions were related to one of those. But, the bowl was not found in the context of other artifacts and this puts it in the suspicious category.   

Ancient societies who left no records, or as in South and Central America where the Christian conquers burned huge volumes of paper records, leave us only with the known knowledge humans have traveled and lived in many areas for longer than our conventional wisdom has passed down. Every different group at every different period has had an "origin of human" story and a version of themselves as just and courageous and had gods who watched over them. I hope we discover many more.

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