One of the more amazing ancient sites in El Salvador are the stones that correspond to four ancient sailing rafts. The stones are located about five kilometers inland from the Toluca Beach, east of La Libertad (click to enlarge). While there is no official dating, my research indicates a date of approximately 8,800 BCE. And my research indicates that the sailing party arrived from either Chile or Peru.
The stones are lying in tall grass and are sitting right next to each other, as if they were purposefully placed that way. There are four sets of most of the stones. The stones include anchor stones. The anchor stones are all cut so that some type of rope could be tied around the stones.
There appeared to be more than four anchor stones. Here's another:
There were four stones that were cooking stones. These varied somewhat but all contained a nearly perfectly round pounding hole. Some contained smaller holes that could have been gourd holders (early cup holders) or they could have been bases for poles used for shelter support. Some had shallowly indented work areas and some had a quite deep indentation for cooking or perhaps as seats. These large stones indicate that the rafts were quite large. A raft that was 8 logs wide and 40 feet long, for example, could use a stone like this for ballast to ensure the raft didn't flip over.
This cooking stone (below) has a very different configuration from the one above but still most of the same features.
There was a pounding stone located next to one of the cooking stones:
One of the most surprising stone types to find were sleeping stones. While generally lower than the cooking stones they tended to be larger and might balance the cooking stones in weight, creating large ballast stones on each side of the sail. While some raft travelers may have slept in hammocks, the sleeping stones would ensure that raft travelers would not be sleeping on the wet raft surface. If you look partway down the left side of this stone you can see a stone pillow.
This stone may have been the central mast stone on one of the rafts.
There is at least one stone that appears to be either a day-keeper stone or a navigation stone, with cut marks made on many parts of the stone.
The stones are located in a rather compact area within the tall grass in the photo below. Rather remarkably, to the left of the sailing stones from this angle, are four large round-ish marker stones.
These stones were moved - rolled - to this location from the surrounding area. However this is a not a stoney area - some may have been rolled several kilometers. My opinion is that each of these stones represent one raft, one family, that arrived to El Salvador. They are memorial stones - grandfather/grandmother stones.
The four grandfather/mother stones: (click to enlarge)
I will examine five questions that this site of four ancient sailing stones raises: has the ocean level really gone down? Who were the ancient sailers? Where did the ancient sailers come from? When the sailers land at Toluca Beach? Where did the sailers go from here?
The Ocean Level. The first question raised by the sailing stones is that this implies that the ocean has gone down in the last 11,000 years. In relative terms, on the Pacific Coast of Central America, this is true. The stones are maybe 15 meters above the level of the ocean. A similar marker stone on Isla Tigre, Honduras, which was likely also placed at ocean shoreline level perhaps 500 years later, is about 12 to 15 meters above the ocean level.
There are at least two historic forces at work. There is a gradual rising of the Pacific coast of Central America as the Cocos continental plate continues to go under the Caribbean plate, which contains all of El Salvador and most of Central America. The western edge of the Caribbean plate, near the Pacific coast, continues to rise through this process. This leads to many earthquakes and volcanos as well as an ocean that appears to be falling.
In reality the ocean has likely risen between 30 and 60 meters in the last 12,000 years, with most of the rising occuring between 10,000 BCE and 6,000 BCE as the ice sheets melted after the last of the Ice Age. It's likely that the Toluca Beach site was submerged by the ocean for many thousands of years and then finally rose out of the ocean 3000-4000 years ago with the rising of the Caribbean plate and continued to rise until recently when recent ocean rising is again reversing the historic trend.
Who were the people who landed at Toluca Beach? Given the two place names in this area - Toluca and Amatal - it is quite clear that these were the ancestors of the modern-day Maya people. Both Toluca and Amatal have significant meanings in proto Ch'orti' Maya. This is similar to all the early South American sites, including the first site, Monte Verde, in southern Chile, and other sites, Taima Taima, Venezuela, Abra-Tocancipa, Columbia, Taltal, Chile, and Lapa do Boquete, Brasil. In the case of Taltal, Playa Amatal shares part of its name: tal means "arrival" in proto Ch'orti'. The shared name suggests a possible link between these two sites.
The Toluca name sounds similar to Tecoluca, a municipality 50 kilometers to the east where the Lempa River drains into the Pacific Ocean. Here is the possible meaning of Toluca in proto-Ch'orti':
T'ohr - anything stacked or piled (the 'l' and 'r' were likely interchangeable at that time)
Uk' - sadness
Kah - beginning, start or k'ah - remembering
I think that the meaning is "remembering in sadness the (horizontal) pile [of stones and rafts]. Perhaps they were sad in leaving behind the old land or were sad for those who may have died on the journey. That both Amatal and Toluca have meanings in proto Ch'orti' answers to a large degree who it was who landed at this beach and left these sailing stones.
Where did the ancient sailers come from?
The two sites along the Pacific coast of South America of a time period of 9000 to 8000 BCE are at Taltal, Chile, and the Guitarrero Cave, Peru. Both the Taltal site and the Guitarrero Cave site have place names consistent with proto-Ch'orti' seen at Toluca-Amatal. The habitation of the Taltal site dates from 10,000 BCE to about 8,500 BCE. The habitation from the Guitarrero Cave site dates from about 10,500 BCE to 5,000 BCE. The Peru site is about 100 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean and the inhabitants there likely maintained contact with the ocean.
The cooking stones shown above are somewhat similar to some of the tacita stones found in northern Chile, several hundred miles south of the Taltal site. Those stones are located at 300 meters above sea level, so they were never used on a raft, but indicate that similar technology was used on land. Here are more photos from a nearby site in Chile.
While the tacita stone sites in Chile and the connection between the names Taltal and Amatal might point toward Taltal, Chile, being the origination of this journey, it could have just as easily been from Peru. The evidence of very early vegetable production in or near the Peru site, starting in 8500 BCE with Aji peppers, is consistent with the very early agricultural production in El Salvador.
When was the journey made? These stones seem to be from an arrival type of journey rather than a short visit, in which case the stones would have been re-used and the grandfather/mother stones would not have been added. These four stones seem to correspond to the four leaders mentioned in the Popol Vuh (PV): Akbar, Kinche' (Quitze), Ik, and Maix (mentioned as Majukutaj in the PV). Therefore, it seems that this journey can be tied to the events in the Popol Vuh.
In fact the names mentioned above correspond to the shifts on which the raft leaders were the lead raft and carried the navigation stone. Akbar means "night", Kinche' means "handle day", Ik means "evening", and Maix means "not ready yet". The latter name almost appears to be a joke but simply means that Maix was not an experienced rafter and was not yet ready to lead the journey.
These first people were the ones who experienced the Xibalba cave soon after landing in El Salvador. I have previously dated this experience to 8800 BCE using the Popol Vuh dating system and the mars retrograde long-count calendar.
Secondly, this journey would correspond to a time before corn was first hibridized. The earliest date determined by scientists so far is 6700 BCE in the Balsas River valley of Southwest Mexico. However the date according to the Popol Vuh was approximately 7900 BCE. This raft journey would have to have occured several hundred years before that.
Third, the ocean level itself indicates a very early date for this journey. If the date would have been later than, say, 8000 BCE, this site would have been submerged by the 100 to 200 additional feet of ocean depth as a result of the melting ice sheets following the Ice Age.
For all of the above I would date this raft journey to 8800 BCE, +/- 200 years.
Where did they go from here? It is impossible to know where this group of families went but my guess is that they went east or northeast where the terrain rises more gently than it would inland to the north or northwest. In addition, there is a village called Nuevo Eden, New Eden, about 17 kilometers to the east and just northwest of the international airport. My guess is that Nuevo Eden was the site of their first encampment. But soon after came their encounter with the Lords of Xibalba!
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