Pathway to the Gods is a BBC television documentary broadcast on 3 November 1977 and directed by Ray Sutcliffe. It filmed Ica stone carver Basilio Uschuya demonstrating, in real time, how he produced the engraved stones later claimed by some fringe writers to depict dinosaurs, advanced technology and other anachronistic subjects: drilling a stone with a dentist's tool and baking it to fake the patina of age. The demonstration is treated as direct evidence in the record kept here of the Ica stones controversy.
Facts
Subject Matter
Religious Subject MatterDocuments the forgery of the Ica stones, artifacts some fringe writers had presented as evidence of ancient contact with advanced or extraterrestrial knowledge; the carver's on-camera demonstration is the primary evidence closing that claim. 1 Scholarly ReceptionSourced to the subject's own accountTreated by archaeologists and skeptical researchers as the decisive demonstration that the Ica stones are a modern forgery industry rather than an ancient artifact; Uschuya himself and other Ica carvers separately confirmed selling stones as tourist curios and antiques. 2 Production
Release Year Country of Origin Learn More
How the BBC Caught the Ica Stones Being Made
The Ica stones are thousands of engraved stones from the region around Ica, Peru, some depicting what promoters read as dinosaurs, advanced surgery or astronomical instruments, and offered from the 1960s onward as evidence of contact between an ancient culture and knowledge it should not have had. Pathway to the Gods, broadcast by the BBC on 3 November 1977 and directed by Ray Sutcliffe, put the question to the man most associated with selling them, farmer and carver Basilio Uschuya, on camera.
Uschuya did not merely describe the forgery, he performed it for the crew: taking an ordinary stone, engraving it with a dentist's drill, and then baking it over a fire to darken and age the fresh cuts so they read as ancient patina rather than a tool mark from that afternoon. The demonstration converts a dispute that could otherwise run on competing claims about mineral weathering and iconographic style into something closer to direct observation: a named individual, on camera, producing the exact kind of object the promotional claims relied on, using tools no ancient carver had.
The film is treated as primary evidence for the forgery industry, cited directly alongside archaeological analysis of the stones' surface treatment and imagery.
What the Demonstration Settled, and Where the Controversy Still Sits
What Pathway to the Gods settled is narrower than it is sometimes credited with settling, and the distinction matters for how the atlas describes the Ica stones today. The film demonstrates that a forgery TECHNIQUE existed, was practiced by named individuals for money, and could produce stones matching the promotional photographs; it does not, on its own, prove that every one of the thousands of stones in circulation is a forgery of this kind, since a large industry supplying tourist curios and antiques dealers is a separate claim from a total inventory.
In practice the two claims collapse into the same conclusion once the wider evidence is weighed together: no Ica stone has a documented, controlled excavation provenance, later interviews found multiple carvers besides Uschuya independently describing the same production and aging methods for the same market, and no mainstream archaeologist treats the collection as authentic. The documentary functions less as a single knockout blow than as the visible, filmable center of a case that is otherwise built from testimony and absence of provenance, which is exactly why skeptical researchers and archaeologists reach for it first.
The wider claim the stones were mustered to support, that an ancient culture recorded dinosaurs or performed advanced surgery, gets no separate defense here: it depends entirely on the stones being genuine, and the stones are not.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Depicts
Films carver Basilio Uschuya demonstrating, on camera, how the Ica stones are forged and aged.
Related To
The documentary's demonstration is treated as direct evidence in the record kept here of the Ica stones controversy.
Same Figure Other Register
The same 1977 BBC documentary, held in the citation register (source, for quoting its evidentiary content) and, here, in the subject register (screenwork, the film treated as an encyclopedia subject).
Sources
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