HARTMAN: ARCHEOLOGICAL RESEARCHES ON THE PACIFIC COAST OF COSTA RICA 39 
When in 1903 I returned to Las Guacas, hoping to more thoroughly examine 
and recover part of the rich material which I had seen in the heaps, I found to my 
great disappointment that hardly anything remained. A considerable part of it 
had been used in constructing the walls of a large oven for sugar-manufacturing 
and the remaining pieces had been buried again during further excavations. On 
my first visit to the home of Padre Velasco in Santa Cruz he showed me in a large 
room more than three hundred metates from Las Guacas placed upon one another 
in rows and covering the wall up to the ceiling. On my second visit this collection 
was considerably reduced. Padre Velasco was constantly supplying the inhabitants 
of Santa Cruz, Nicoya, and the surrounding country with ancient metates from Las 
Guacas for household use. ‘They were sold by him for eight to fourteen pesos apiece, 
and he had been able for a long time to satisfy the demand of the whole district. 
Only in a very few houses did I find modern metates from Puntarenas, which town 
imports the stones from Nicaragua. Occasionally a few are procured from the high- 
lands, where they are manufactured at Cartago. According to the information and 
calculation of Padre Velasco, Antonio Carillo, and men employed on the excava- 
tions, there must at a low estimate have been found altogether two thousand metates 
in this burial-ground, though a very large portion of them were broken. In no 
other locality in Costa Rica, or for that matter in the whole of Central America, as 
far as my knowledge goes, has any similar extraordinary number of these imple- 
ments been located in a single burial-ground. During my excavations on the spot, 
when about fifty complete metates were exhumed, not a single complete rubbing 
stone was discovered. Only a couple of small fragments were brought to light. 
On the contrary, in my previous excavations at Las Casitas I found “los manos”’ 
with several metates. Almost all the rubbing stones here used were cylindrical 
and more or less flattened, and so much longer than the breadth of the metate 
that the hands of the women when grinding could comfortably grasp both ends of 
the grinder on either side. 
All the metates of Las Guacas, so far as I have been able to ascertain, are pro- 
vided with three legs. There are two distinct types, distinguished by the shape of 
the legs, viz.: those with cylindrical, or in some cases conical legs, and those with 
flat, nearly triangular legs. In both groups the plate is evenly and gently curved 
upward before and behind; only a comparatively small number of specimens of the 
first group have a shallow depression deepening from all sides to the middle. 
Specimens belonging to the former group are by far the most numerous. Of 
fifty-two metates which I excavated at Las Guacas only three belonged to the latter 
group. The metates of this group are, as a rule, of considerably larger size, the 
