Mushroom stones are portable stone sculptures shaped like a cap on a stem, often with a human, animal or bird figure carved on the stem. The archaeologist Stephan de Borhegyi, who first classified them, wrote in 1961 that most come from the Guatemalan highlands, with others from El Salvador and southern Mexico, and that they usually stand 28 to 38 cm tall (Borhegyi, 1961). Counts range from about a hundred in the 1950s (Wasson and Wasson, 1957) to “several hundred” in a 2023 abstract (Maca, 2023).
Their dates rest mostly on style, because few were excavated. Borhegyi described nine miniature stones said to have been found with nine miniature grinding stones at Kaminaljuyú, dated by type to about 1000–500 BC, but the finder never named the mound (Borhegyi, 1961). The mycologist Bernard Lowy noted that the original locality of most stones is unknown (Lowy, 1971).
The Wassons, Borhegyi and Lowy read them as signs of a ritual mushroom cult. Others proposed seats or land markers, and in 1976 Ulrich Köhler argued they were potters’ molds (Köhler, 1976). No residue, inscription or excavated context ties a stone directly to eating mushrooms, so their meaning remains open.
Sources
- Borhegyi, 1961, American Antiquity 26(4)
- Lowy, 1971, Mycologia 63(5)
- Köhler, 1976, American Antiquity 41(2)
- Maca, 2023, Society for American Archaeology abstract
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