Great Stone Faces

For years natives of southern Mexico have told stories of monstrous stone heads buried in the earth. In 1938 Matthew William Stirling, heading a joint expedition of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society, unearthed in Veracruz a carved stone head six feet high. This year, hacking around in the Tabasco jungle, he discovered five more heads, several bigger than the Veracruz find. Last week the National Geographic Society released a picture of one of them, estimated to weigh 20 tons or more. It is 8 ft. i in. high, 20 ft. 10 in. around. Flat-faced, blunt-featured, almost earless, capped by a queer headpiece, it looks something like a subthyroid football player.

The diggers do not know how old the great faces are, who carved them, or what their significance was. They will try to find out. They guess that the carvings must have served some purpose in awesome religious rites. The heads have no apparent kinship with any known Mayan sculpture. Biggest mystery: Tabasco heads are made of basalt, and the nearest known source of basalt is 100 miles away. The people who made them must have done a tall job of transportation.

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