The stone spheres in the South Pacific in Costa Rica constitute one of the most singular objects of the archeological World Heritage. In the country the counting is 286 spheres, going from sculptures of 2,5 diameter meters and 15 tons up to small samples of few kilos. At the end of the 30s there was documented the first biggest stone spheres.
These spheres never stop being a scientific interest and the admiration of the precision and the finishing or the surfaces, the abundance of the spheres, the variety of them and the colorful formations of some group. Because of all of the above, a delegation of invited UNESCO experts will be visiting the South Pacific in Costa Rica to initiate the values according to the parameters of the UNESCO with the idea to show the only character, representation, authenticity and conservation of the heritage that wants to be nominated.
This isn’t a new process, since 2002 the National Museum of Costa Rica promotes the declaratory of the spheres and some of the archeological sites like these ones, inside the category of “cultural landscape” of World Heritage by the UNESCO. However, the process initiated in the last decades, has a current new impulse and is taking form in the administration of the work of archeologist Francisco Corrales from the National Museum of Costa Rica and the archeologist Ifigenia Quintanilla, with the objective to form a working-team dedicated to elaborate such an answer which gives a turn to the 2002 approach.
This new stage of the process frames within the new Thematic Initiative “Prehistory and World Heritage” promoted by the World Heritage Center since 2009. In this sense, Costa Rica wants to propose the nomination as a group of archeological sites from the South Pacific with stone spheres associated, within the category of World Heritage.
The South Pacific zone of Costa Rica, specifically in the basin of the Grande de Terraba River. It presents several characteristics that gives it a potential to opt for this category, such as there isn’t another place like this on Earth, the big amount of the sites with these spheres, 40 as total, represented in the middle and lower part of the river and other 5 in the farthest areas from the river, but always in the South Pacific.
From the other side, the stone spheres are a singular expression of cultural because they are the materialization of a concept or the idea that in the South Pacific of Costa Rica acquired a form through the carving of the rocks obtained locally, reproduced in several different sizes in dozens of samples giving different finishing touches to the surfaces since coarse to polished surfaces and figures carved in high and low set off.
The spheres formed a part of all of a social joint and require being part of a World Heritage generated from a series of knowledge, techniques and certain social circumstances. So, the sites and the archeological contexts in which they have been constituted the base of the comprehension.
The search and the eventual declaratory will force a new professional profile of those who work with the World Heritage, because it will require a reorientation of the researched practices which will have to be necessarily interdisciplinary and adapted to the international scientific parameters and it implicates a inter-institutional work and a firm and permanent joint with the local communities. A distinction like this will help to place the South Pacific as a unique place because of its natural and archeological heritage.
People and Society 
