Utuado, Puerto Rico - For more than a century, the fist-sized rocks etched with enigmatic patterns were ignored by academics and shunned by cultural power brokers. Discovered in Puerto Rico in the 1880s by a priest who was convinced they were a link to one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the stones were declared forgeries in the early 1900s by researchers from the Smithsonian Institution. And so the rocks languished — literally collecting dust. When Puerto Rican archaeologist Reniel Rodríguez Ramos first stumbled onto the collection in 2001, the artifacts were so unappreciated that one was being used as...
