Mushroom stones of the Maya highlands: what the carvings are, how old they are, and what is still disputed

Mushroom stones are carved stone objects shaped like a mushroom: a cap on a stem, often with a human, animal or bird figure on the stem. They come mainly from the Guatemalan highlands, with others from El Salvador and southern Mexico (Borhegyi, 1961). Nobody disputes that they exist. What they were for, and how old most of them are, is still argued.

This page sets out what the published record says, who argued what and when, and where the evidence runs out. It is the archaeology chapter of a longer story: our history of magic mushrooms covers the wider timeline, our page on María Sabina covers the living Mazatec practice, and the psilocybin timeline puts the dates side by side.

What are mushroom stones?

They are portable sculptures, most of them a little over knee-high to a seated person. Stephan de Borhegyi, the archaeologist who first classified them, wrote in 1961 that they ordinarily average 28 to 38 cm in height, with some later ones from Guatemala’s south coast slightly smaller (Borhegyi, 1961). He sorted them into four main types. Type A are human figures wearing a mushroom-shaped cap. Type B have a groove circling the base of the cap. Type C are plain or carved stems on a square or rounded base. Type D stand on three feet, like a tripod.

The figures on the stems vary widely. Borhegyi listed aged and youthful seated people, birds, monkeys, jaguars, rabbits or deer, coatis and toads (Borhegyi, 1961). The mycologist Bernard Lowy, writing ten years later, described a stone in a Guatemala City private collection carved with a pregnant woman, and a pair of unusually tall stones, one male and one female, found together south of Escuintla (Lowy, 1971).

Not every collection uses the name. The Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin catalogues one Guatemalan piece, 33.1 cm tall, as a mushroom-shaped stone stool with monkeys as supports, of the Late Preclassic period, 440 BC to AD 250 (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, IV Ca 41430). The label itself takes a side in the debate described below.

How many mushroom stones are known?

The count has grown with every survey, and the published figures do not agree. In 1957 the Wassons wrote that Borhegyi had nearly finished examining “all the known mushroom stones, totalling more than a hundred” (Wasson and Wasson, 1957). Lowy, in 1971, described Borhegyi’s chart as covering stones “numbering about 50”, and said his own inquiries had added about another 50 (Lowy, 1971).

Later figures are higher. The Mexican mycologist Gastón Guzmán wrote that “more than 300” were known, most from the Maya area of Guatemala, citing Borhegyi, Lowy and a 1977 catalogue by Karl Herbert Mayer (Guzmán, “Fungi in the Maya Culture”). A 2023 conference abstract by the archaeologist Allan Maca says “several hundred” exist (Maca, 2023). We could not open Mayer’s catalogue or the 1994 Japanese exhibition catalogue Piedras-Hongo, so we give no single total. The honest answer is a few hundred, counted differently by different authors.

Where were mushroom stones found?

Most come from the central Guatemalan highlands. Borhegyi’s 1961 distribution table lists Kaminaljuyú on the edge of Guatemala City, Mixco, Salcajá, Amatitlán and other highland sites; El Baúl and other places on Guatemala’s Pacific plain; Tazumal and Las Victorias in western El Salvador; and Ocosingo, Chiapa de Corzo, Oaxaca and Tabasco in Mexico (Borhegyi, 1961). The same table even lists one possibly related stone from Bolivia, a sign of how broad his comparisons were.

They are absent from the Maya lowlands. The Wassons noted that none had been found in the Petén or Yucatán, the heartland of Classic Maya cities (Wasson and Wasson, 1957). Lowy agreed in 1971: the stones seemed confined to the highlands and the Pacific slopes, and his own inquiries in the Petén found none (Lowy, 1971). Borhegyi later described a separate group of mushroom-shaped pottery objects, which had first been reported from El Salvador and which he could place with certainty at nine sites in Chiapas, Tabasco and the Guatemalan lowlands (Borhegyi, 1963).

The biggest problem is provenance. Lowy wrote that, apart from a few exceptions, “the precise original locality of the stones is unknown”, because most were dug up by labourers and some passed through art and novelty shops (Lowy, 1971). Maca’s 2023 abstract makes the same point: relatively few have been found in place, which is partly why their function and chronology remain unclear (Maca, 2023).

How are mushroom stones dated?

Mostly by style, anchored by a handful of excavated pieces. Borhegyi assigned Type B (grooved caps) to the Early and Late Preclassic, 1000 BC to AD 200; Type C to the Late Preclassic and probably the Early Classic; and the tripods of Type D to the Late Classic, AD 600 to 900. He left Type A undated (Borhegyi, 1961). The Wassons, drawing on his chart, wrote that the stones seemed to thin out in the Early Classic, reappear crudely carved in the Late Classic, and then vanish (Wasson and Wasson, 1957).

The anchor points are few. At Kaminaljuyú, archaeologists Edwin Shook and A. V. Kidder found a tripod jaguar-effigy stone, 37 cm tall, in Tomb I of Mound E-III-3, a tomb assigned to the Verbena subphase, about 1000 to 500 BC, as Borhegyi reported (Borhegyi, 1961). Lowy added two more with good context: a plain tripod excavated in 1968 from a Kaminaljuyú tomb with human remains, and a stone found at or near the surface by a University of Pennsylvania team (Lowy, 1971). He stressed that, with those exceptions, mushroom stones “cannot be assumed to have originated from burial sites”.

The famous early date has a weak link. Borhegyi’s 1961 paper described nine miniature stones, 14 to 18 cm tall, said to have come from one cache at Kaminaljuyú together with nine miniature grinding stones (metates) and their hand stones (manos). He dated the cache to 1000 to 500 BC by type. But he did not excavate it: the pieces were in a private Guatemala City collection, and the paper says the finder never disclosed which mound they came from (Borhegyi, 1961).

The chronologies themselves differ. Lowy’s period ranges put the Early Preclassic at 2000 to 1000 BC, earlier than Borhegyi’s (Lowy, 1971). Maca’s abstract says production spanned “nearly 1000 years” (Maca, 2023), far shorter than Borhegyi’s span of nearly two millennia. Later retellings stretch further: a 2015 review abstract says mushroom stones “dating from 3000 BC” were found in ritual contexts (Carod-Artal, 2015), a date we did not find in any of the primary papers we read.

What were mushroom stones for? The competing interpretations

There are at least six readings in the literature. Some are well argued, some rest on one person’s remark, and none has been proven. The table sums them up, and the sections below give the detail.

The phallic reading

The oldest reading is that they were phallic symbols. Lowy wrote that before 1898 the few specialists who had noticed the stones “were inclined to interpret them as phallic symbols”, and that Sapper opposed this for “obvious morphological reasons” (Lowy, 1971). Borhegyi in 1963 still listed phallic representations among the theories that had been put forward (Borhegyi, 1963). The Wassons answered it bluntly in a footnote: “no phallus is present in any mushroom stone so far discovered” (Wasson and Wasson, 1957). Lowy’s pregnant-figure stone led him to a related but different idea, that some stones may have belonged to a fertility cult (Lowy, 1971).

The ritual mushroom reading

The best-known reading comes from R. Gordon Wasson, the banker and amateur mycologist, and his wife, Valentina. In 1957 they wrote that they appeared to be the first to suggest the stones were effigies of mushrooms tied to a highland cult, adding in brackets “be it noted: we do not assert”. A few pages later they went further: the presumption now favoured a mushroom explanation, and “the burden of the argument” lay on its opponents (Wasson and Wasson, 1957). Our page on Wasson’s 1957 Life article covers the same year from the magazine side.

Borhegyi built the archaeological case. In 1961 he argued that nine miniature stones buried with nine miniature metates and manos “greatly strengthens the possibility” that grinding stones were used to prepare sacred mushrooms in some areas. He also floated a link to the nine lords of the night in Maya and Aztec belief, but called that identification “on very shaky ground” himself (Borhegyi, 1961). He noted that none of the miniature metates showed wear, so their role was symbolic at most.

Lowy supported the reading in 1971 as the one “toward which most of the evidence now points”, citing a stone with a reclining head he read as dreaming or hallucinating, and the stone of a woman kneeling at a metate (Lowy, 1971). He also admitted the gap: mushroom stones are not shown in the surviving Maya codices, and he found no mention of them in post-conquest chronicles. A painted manuscript he photographed in 1970, which seemed to show a figure holding a large mushroom, was unauthenticated, as he said himself.

Modern papers often repeat this reading as settled. A 2019 study of mushroom knowledge among Kaqchikel Maya people calls the stones “a clear indication” of deep pre-Columbian roots (Mérida Ponce et al., 2019), and a 2024 paper on a Maya ritual deposit cites the Kaminaljuyú stones as indicating ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms (Lentz et al., 2024). Both cite Borhegyi rather than new evidence about the stones.

Seats, land markers and potters’ molds

Three practical readings have been put forward. Lowy reported that Edwin Shook had considered in the 1940s that the stones might be land markers, and that a painting in the Quetzaltenango museum shows a surveyor using one; its painter told Lowy the idea came from talks with Borhegyi. Lowy also mentioned the idea that they were seats, but said he knew of no evidence for it (Lowy, 1971). The Berlin museum’s catalogue entry for one stone as a “stool” shows that reading lives on (Ethnologisches Museum Berlin).

The sharpest challenge came in 1976. Ulrich Köhler’s paper in American Antiquity said the ritual explanation “seems on its way to general acceptance”, and that his analysis “refutes such an interpretation” and shows the stones were really potters’ molds (Köhler, 1976). We read only the abstract, so we cannot assess his argument. Borhegyi had raised a similar “disconcerting possibility” for the pottery mushrooms in 1963, then argued against it: modern mushroom-shaped pottery molds have solid handles, while the ancient pottery mushrooms have hollow stems (Borhegyi, 1963).

The ball-game reading

The ball-game link is the thinnest. In a 1967 paper on miniature stone objects, Borhegyi discussed mushroom stones alongside yokes, “toad altars” and other pieces, and suggested that some of these miniatures may have been used in the various forms of the pre-Columbian ball game (Borhegyi, 1967). His ball-game identifications were already contested: a 1963 reply by Francis Clune said his reading of certain “handstones” as players’ gear was not supported by the documents or the archaeology (Clune, 1963), and Borhegyi defended it in 1964 (Borhegyi, 1964). That exchange was about handstones, not mushroom stones.

Who first called them mushrooms?

Even this is disputed. Lowy wrote that Carl Sapper, in an 1898 article, was the first to suggest the stones might really represent mushrooms (Lowy, 1971). The Wassons read Sapper differently: he described the Zurich stone as mushroom-shaped, they wrote, “but he did not suggest that the carving might really represent a mushroom” (Wasson and Wasson, 1957). Guzmán’s chapter says Sapper found the first stone in El Salvador and that the piece is now in a Zurich museum (Guzmán). We could not open Sapper’s paper, so we cannot settle it.

The later history is clearer. The Wassons learned about the stones from Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, and late in 1952 he put them on to Borhegyi, then reorganizing the collections of Guatemala’s national museum (Wasson and Wasson, 1957). Their book, Borhegyi’s papers of 1961 and 1963, and Lowy’s 1971 survey made the ritual reading the standard one in print. Köhler’s 1976 paper is the main published dissent we found.

What we don't know about mushroom stones

• What any single stone was used for. No inscription, residue study or excavated context we found ties a mushroom stone directly to eating mushrooms.
• How many exist. Published counts run from about 50 to several hundred, and the catalogues by Mayer (1977) and Ohi and Torres (1994) were not available to us.
• How old most of them are. Few were excavated, so dates rest on Borhegyi’s style types, and later authors give different spans.
• Whether the miniature cache came from one deposit. The finder never named the mound, so its date depends on the collector’s account and on typology.
• Whether Köhler’s potter’s-mold argument holds up. We could read only his abstract, and we found no published reply.
• Whether Canadian museums hold mushroom stones. The Royal Ontario Museum’s online collection did not respond when we checked on 25 October 2026.

For tracing other origin claims back to their sources, see our guide to researching magic mushroom origin stories. For a theory that reaches much further back with much less evidence, see our stoned ape theory fact-check.

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