We were leaving the mesa and saw a campesino, field laborer, riding his old bike up the dirt road which ascends the mesa. We stopped him and asked if he knew where any artifacts were. At first he played dumb, but as we talked he seemed to trust us and led us to the big altar slab and to this.


Why in the world this artifact is still in the wild is almost a much of a mystery as what it really is. Obviously it is a very large disk of stone. It is corroded, or better stated, it is oxidized. Look closely and you can see lines and carvings--designs of some kind. Click to enlarge.


The man standing by Elder Collins is our campesino friend. His family has run cows on this land for many years. His grandmother showed him this disk when he was a child. He sayes that beneath the oxidation it is jade. You can see a greenish color in the area which the elders rubbed off a little bit. Value? Who knows? Incredible. He showed us a couple of other interesting artifacts as well and mentioned that he knows where one of those big stone balls is, just sitting out in the field. We feel very fortunate to have seen these things. We suspect that very few have.