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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
Previous Claim: CH710.1   |   List of Claims   |   Next Claim: CH711

Claim CH710.2:

Thousands of clay and stone figurines discovered in Acambaro, Mexico, include figurines of dinosaurs. They are apparently from the preclassical Chupicuaro Culture (800 B.C.E. to 200 C.E.). Radiocarbon and thermoluminescent dating gives them even older ages. These figurines show that the ancient people were familiar with dinosaurs.

Source:

Swift, Dennis et al., n.d. The dinosaur figurines of Acambaro, Mexico. http://www.bible.ca/tracks/tracks-acambaro.htm
Berlitz, Charles, 1984. Atlantis, the Eighth Continent. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, pp. 181-182.

Response:

  1. The figurines show every evidence of being recent folk art, fraudulently buried in an archeological excavation. De Peso (1953) made the following observations:


  2. The story of their discovery gives a motive for fraud. Waldemar Julsrud, who hired workers to excavate a Chupicuaro site in 1945, paid workers a peso apiece for intact figurines. It very well may have been more economical for the workers to make figurines than to discover and excavate them. Given the quantity that he received, the contribution to the peasants' economy would have been substantial.

  3. The figurines are not from the Chupicuaro. They came from within a single-component Tarascan ruin. The Tarascan are post-classical and historical, emerging between 900 and 1522 C.E.

  4. If authentic, the figurines imply even more archeological anomalies:
  5. There is no credible information to support the claims. The only sources are pseudoscience journalists, creationists, and crackpots, who have obvious ulterior motives for gullibility. Their own dating results are discordant with each other and with the ages of the native cultures, and even attempting to do carbon dating on the inorganic figurines shows their incompetence.

References:

  1. Di Peso, Charles C., 1953. (see below)

Further Reading:

Di Peso, Charles C., 1953. The clay figurines of Acambaro, Guanajuato, Mexico. American Antiquity 18(4): 388-389.
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created 2003-7-27, modified 2004-4-29