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Two Stone Heads Found at Peru’s Chavín de Huántar

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

HUARAZ, PERU—Two sculpted heads thought to date to between 1200 and 1500 B.C. have been discovered at the Chavín de Huántar archaeological site. Many such heads were found inside the site’s temples—more than 100 of them are held at the National Chavín Museum—but many more were lost in a flood in 1940. “The last time we found a Chavín head was back in 2006. Before that we found one in 2004, and before that it had been 60 years,” said John Rick of Stanford University. He thinks the two new heads, which have large eyes, wrinkles, pronounced nostrils, and are covered with snakes, depict people who are in a drug-induced trance. They may have been toppled from a wall during an earthquake.

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