El Graduado
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I wrote a book about nine years ago and then I let it go out of print, due to my changing interest. In other words, something else bright and shiny caught my eye! It was a book about Forrest Fenn (a good friend of mine) and our excavation of an ancient Tano Indian pueblo named San Lazaro on Forrest's land in the Galisteo basin near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Forrest is the multimillionaire art collector who buried two-million-dollars’ worth of gold and gems, then wrote a book containing a poem about where to find it: The Thrill of the Chase.
When Forrest decided to bury his treasure, he asked me to find him an antique “book of hours” box (a type of fancy, 16th-century, wrought-iron box) so he could use it to hold his treasure. I was unable to locate such a box in time, so he used a replica box instead. I remember him handing me a gold nugget he was going to include in the treasure; it was as big as a turkey’s egg!
I hadn’t thought much about my out-of-print book until Forrest recently told me that second-hand copies of it were selling for $350. That’s 350 dollars, not pesos!
I know it’s not Cozumel related (although in a weird instance of “six-degree-of-separation”, Forrest’s brother died while diving in Cozumel in 1976), but if anyone is interested, I reissued the book on Amazon.com; The Lost Kivas of San Lazaro.
Here is another connection the book has to Cozumel: During the excavation of San Lazaro, a couple of pairs of “lightning stones” were discovered, cached in one of the kivas (underground, ceremonial chambers). Lightning stones are small, smooth, milky-white, quartzite pebbles which, when rubbed together, produce a strong scent of ozone together with flashes of light that emanate from within the stones. This light is not produced by incandescent sparks, as when flint is struck by steel, but rather by a process known as triboluminescence. This type of luminescence is caused by the mechanoluminescent properties of quartzite, which can be activated by mechanical force in the forms of pressure or friction. David S. Whitley, in his 1999 article in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal describes triboluminescence as: “A photon flash caused by electrons in the quartz atoms that have been ejected by gamma radiation penetrating crystal lattice defects. A small mechanical shock allows these electrons to overcome their energy barrier and to cascade down to ground state, giving off a glow as they return to their atomic orbit.”
The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico regarded these stones as magical and used them in ceremonies related to weather. Other tribes in California and Arizona used them in a similar fashion. Archeologists reported finding lightning stone pairs in many excavations made in the American Southwest and a pair of lightning stones discovered inside a kiva sometime during the 1930s is on exhibit in the Florence Hawley Ellis Museum at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, NM.
Lightning stones can be distinguished from “polishing stones,” “burnishing stones,” or “pebble smoothers” by their color (lightning stones must be white or translucent in order to see the faint glow), lack of exaggerated faceting, and the fact that they were often cached in pairs. In all of the New Mexican pairs I have examined, the stones that made up the pairs were each, more-or less, of similar size, shape and color. It is my belief that many times archaeologists do not recognize the difference between lightning stones and polishing stones, and often mistake the former for the latter. For example, in Early Desert Farming and Irrigation Settlements: Archaeological Investigations in the Phoenix Sky Harbor Center, by D. H. Greenwald, et al., the authors state: “Field personnel recovered two caliche-encrusted quartzite polishing stones from a bird effigy vessel at the base of a bell-shaped storage pit, Sub-feature 8/8-40-2, in a surface adobe-walled structure.” Could these have been paired quartzite lightning stones cached inside the bird effigy vessel, instead of the more common polishing stones used to burnish?
While making a surface collection after a rain at Sitio Venado, (a portion of the pre-Columbian Maya village of Xamancab, on the west coast of Cozumel) I found two small lightning stones lying only inches from one another that had been eroded out of a small embankment in front of the foundation of a post-classic Maya structure. Since the island of Cozumel is made up of solidified marine calcareous sediments (limestone) and has no naturally occurring quartzite, these two quartzite pebbles stood out as being obviously imported to the island. So far, no other quartzite pebbles have turned up at Sitio Venado and the only other imported lithic artifacts I found there to date are made of obsidian or chert. The square meter designated Y-25 on the embankment at Sitio Venado where the two lightning stones were found yielded many other notable pieces during earlier post-rain visits: Over 100 olivera shells, 7 obsidian blades, and several olivera “tinklers” have been logged in so far.
When I began to search the records for other mentions of lightning stones turning up in archaeological contexts in Yucatan, Quintana Roo, or anywhere else in Mexico for that matter, I was left empty handed. There are many references to “polishing stones,” “burnishing stones,” or “pebble smoothers” in the literature regarding Mexican archaeological sites, but no “lightning stones.” Could this be an example of lightning stone pairs simply being misidentified and overlooked? Surely, I didn’t find the only two examples in all of Mexico! I did find one report, Classic Maya lithic artifacts from the Main Plaza of Aguateca, Guatemala by Kazuo Aoyama that seems to hint that other examples have been found, but not correctly identified. Aoyama wrote: “Although we do not know the functions of the pebble smoothers, they may have been used as stucco smoothers. While some pebble smoothers show flat worn facets, other smoothers evidence either no use-wear or have been worn smooth over their entire surface.”
Anyway, if you are interested, my once out-of-print book, The Lost Kivas of San Lazaro, is now available on Amazon.com.
When Forrest decided to bury his treasure, he asked me to find him an antique “book of hours” box (a type of fancy, 16th-century, wrought-iron box) so he could use it to hold his treasure. I was unable to locate such a box in time, so he used a replica box instead. I remember him handing me a gold nugget he was going to include in the treasure; it was as big as a turkey’s egg!
I hadn’t thought much about my out-of-print book until Forrest recently told me that second-hand copies of it were selling for $350. That’s 350 dollars, not pesos!
I know it’s not Cozumel related (although in a weird instance of “six-degree-of-separation”, Forrest’s brother died while diving in Cozumel in 1976), but if anyone is interested, I reissued the book on Amazon.com; The Lost Kivas of San Lazaro.
Here is another connection the book has to Cozumel: During the excavation of San Lazaro, a couple of pairs of “lightning stones” were discovered, cached in one of the kivas (underground, ceremonial chambers). Lightning stones are small, smooth, milky-white, quartzite pebbles which, when rubbed together, produce a strong scent of ozone together with flashes of light that emanate from within the stones. This light is not produced by incandescent sparks, as when flint is struck by steel, but rather by a process known as triboluminescence. This type of luminescence is caused by the mechanoluminescent properties of quartzite, which can be activated by mechanical force in the forms of pressure or friction. David S. Whitley, in his 1999 article in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal describes triboluminescence as: “A photon flash caused by electrons in the quartz atoms that have been ejected by gamma radiation penetrating crystal lattice defects. A small mechanical shock allows these electrons to overcome their energy barrier and to cascade down to ground state, giving off a glow as they return to their atomic orbit.”
The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico regarded these stones as magical and used them in ceremonies related to weather. Other tribes in California and Arizona used them in a similar fashion. Archeologists reported finding lightning stone pairs in many excavations made in the American Southwest and a pair of lightning stones discovered inside a kiva sometime during the 1930s is on exhibit in the Florence Hawley Ellis Museum at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, NM.
Lightning stones can be distinguished from “polishing stones,” “burnishing stones,” or “pebble smoothers” by their color (lightning stones must be white or translucent in order to see the faint glow), lack of exaggerated faceting, and the fact that they were often cached in pairs. In all of the New Mexican pairs I have examined, the stones that made up the pairs were each, more-or less, of similar size, shape and color. It is my belief that many times archaeologists do not recognize the difference between lightning stones and polishing stones, and often mistake the former for the latter. For example, in Early Desert Farming and Irrigation Settlements: Archaeological Investigations in the Phoenix Sky Harbor Center, by D. H. Greenwald, et al., the authors state: “Field personnel recovered two caliche-encrusted quartzite polishing stones from a bird effigy vessel at the base of a bell-shaped storage pit, Sub-feature 8/8-40-2, in a surface adobe-walled structure.” Could these have been paired quartzite lightning stones cached inside the bird effigy vessel, instead of the more common polishing stones used to burnish?
While making a surface collection after a rain at Sitio Venado, (a portion of the pre-Columbian Maya village of Xamancab, on the west coast of Cozumel) I found two small lightning stones lying only inches from one another that had been eroded out of a small embankment in front of the foundation of a post-classic Maya structure. Since the island of Cozumel is made up of solidified marine calcareous sediments (limestone) and has no naturally occurring quartzite, these two quartzite pebbles stood out as being obviously imported to the island. So far, no other quartzite pebbles have turned up at Sitio Venado and the only other imported lithic artifacts I found there to date are made of obsidian or chert. The square meter designated Y-25 on the embankment at Sitio Venado where the two lightning stones were found yielded many other notable pieces during earlier post-rain visits: Over 100 olivera shells, 7 obsidian blades, and several olivera “tinklers” have been logged in so far.
When I began to search the records for other mentions of lightning stones turning up in archaeological contexts in Yucatan, Quintana Roo, or anywhere else in Mexico for that matter, I was left empty handed. There are many references to “polishing stones,” “burnishing stones,” or “pebble smoothers” in the literature regarding Mexican archaeological sites, but no “lightning stones.” Could this be an example of lightning stone pairs simply being misidentified and overlooked? Surely, I didn’t find the only two examples in all of Mexico! I did find one report, Classic Maya lithic artifacts from the Main Plaza of Aguateca, Guatemala by Kazuo Aoyama that seems to hint that other examples have been found, but not correctly identified. Aoyama wrote: “Although we do not know the functions of the pebble smoothers, they may have been used as stucco smoothers. While some pebble smoothers show flat worn facets, other smoothers evidence either no use-wear or have been worn smooth over their entire surface.”
Anyway, if you are interested, my once out-of-print book, The Lost Kivas of San Lazaro, is now available on Amazon.com.
