The Nazca Desert is a high plateau about sixty miles long and five miles wide on the coast of Peru, some 250 miles south of Lima. At some time before 1000 BCE, a people who developed advanced farming methods that allowed them to build an irrigation system, improve their crops, and expand the area of land they could farm inhabited the Nazca Valley.

Over the next 1,500 years, they also developed outstanding skills in weaving, pottery, and architecture. The Nazca were wiped out after the Spanish conquest, so that piece of history is quite blank. Perhaps the most fascinating of their cultural achievements was the creation of a remarkable ground art -- the exact purpose of which remains a mystery.

Therein lies the mystery. Why would anyone bother to make figures that could only be appreciated from the air in an era when there were no airplanes? It is well established that these drawings are at least fifteen hundred years old.

Archaeologists have developed several explanations for this: one is that the figures, probably of religious significance, were not meant to be seen as a while by human eyes; a second is that the Nazca people built balloons that allowed them to view the figures when they flew over the sites. This suggestion, while not impossible, lacks supporting evidence.

The so-called Nazca lines, of which there are thousands, consist, according to investigator William H. Isbell, of five kinds of markings: long straight lines; large geometric figures; drawings of plants and animals; rock piles; and figures decorating hillsides. The figures come in two types: biomorphs and geoglyphs. The biomorphs are some 70 animal and plant figures that include a spider, hummingbird, monkey and a 1,000-foot-long pelican. The biomorphs are grouped together in one area on the plain. Some archaeologists believe they were constructed around 200 B.C., about 500 years before the geoglyphs.

There are about 900 geoglyphs on the plain. Geoglyphs are geometric forms that include straight lines, triangles, spirals, circles and trapezoids. They are enormous in size. The longest straight line goes nine miles across the plain.

The forms are so difficult to see from the ground that they were not discovered until the 1930’s when aircraft, when surveying for water, spotted them. The plain, crisscrossed, by these giant lines with many forming rectangles, has a striking resemblance to a modern airport. The Swiss writer, Erich von Daniken, even suggested they had been built for the convenience of ancient visitors from space to land their ships. As tempting as it might be to subscribe to this theory, the desert floor at Nasca is soft earth and loose stone, not tarmac, and would not support the landing wheels of either an aircraft or a flying saucer.

So why are the lines there? The American explorer Paul Kosok, who made his first visit to Nasca in the 1940s, suggested that the lines were astronomically significant and that the plain acted as a giant observatory. He called them “the largest astronomy book in the world.” Gerald Hawkins, an American astronomer, tested this theory in 1968 by feeding the position of a sample of lines into a computer and having a program calculate how many lines coincided with an important astronomical event. Hawkins showed the number of lines that were astronomically significant were only about the same number that would be the result of pure chance. This makes it seem unlikely Nasca is an observatory.

Perhaps the best theory for the lines and symbols belongs to Tony Morrison, the English explorer. By researching the old folk ways of the people of the Andes mountains, Morrison discovered a tradition of wayside shrines linked by straight pathways. The faithful would move from shrine to shrine praying and meditating. Often the shrine was as simple as a small pile of stones. Morrison suggests that the lines at Nasca were similar in purpose and on a vast scale. The symbols may have served as special enclosures for religious ceremonies.

How were they built? Straight lines can be made easily for great distances with simple tools. Two wooden stakes placed as a straight line would be used to guide the placement of a third stake along the line. One person would sight along the first two stakes and instructs a second person in the placement of the new stake. This can be repeated as many times as needed to make an almost perfectly-straight line miles in length. Drawing the desired figure at some reasonable size, then using a grid system to divide it up, probably made the symbols. The symbol could then be redrawn at full scale by recreating the grid on the ground and working on each individual square one at a time.

Recently two researchers, David Johnson and Steve Mabee, have advanced a theory that the geoglyphs may be related to water. The Nasca plain is one of the driest places on Earth, getting less than one inch of rain a year. Johnson, while looking for sources of water in the region, noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines. Johnson thinks that the shapes may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land. Mabee is working to gather evidence that might confirm this theory.

Other scientists are more skeptical, but admit that in a region where finding water was vital to survival, there might well be some connection between the ceremonial purpose of the lines and water. Johan Reinhard, a cultural anthropologist with the National Geographic Society, found that villagers in Bolivia walk along a straight pathway to shrines while praying and dancing for rain. Something similar may have been done at the ancient Nasca lines.

The lines at Nasca aren’t the only landscape figures Peru boasts. About 850 miles south of the plain is the largest human figure in the world laid out upon the side of Solitary Mountain. The Giant of Atacama stands 393 feet high and is surrounded by lines similar to those at Nasca.

Along the Pacific Coast in the foothills of the Andes Mountains is etched a figure resembling a giant candelabrum. Further south, Sierra Pintada, which means “the painted mountain” in Spanish, is covered with vast pictures including spirals, circles, warriors and a condor. Archaeologists speculate that these figures, clearly visible from the ground, served as guideposts for Inca traders.

On the pampa, south of the Nasca Lines, archaeologists have now uncovered the lost city of the line-builders, Cahuachi. It was built nearly two thousand years ago and was mysteriously abandoned 500 years later. New discoveries at Cahuachi are at last beginning to give us insight into the Nasca people and to unravel the mystery of the Nasca Lines.

Cahuachi is emerging as a treasure trove of the Nasca culture. As Orefici and his team excavate, discoveries of paintings on preserved pottery, and the ancient technique of weaving that the Nasca people developed, have given an insight into how the lines may have been made, and what they might have been used for, more than 1500 years ago.

Theories About The Nasca Lines
1. They were used for rituals, probably related to astronomy.
2. There were used to confirm the “ayllus” or clans who made up the population and to determine through ritual their economic functions held up by reciprocity and redistribution.
3. They were created for ET creator Gods.

In 1969, Erich von Daniken floated the idea that airborne extraterrestrials might have laid out the lines as runways for their aircraft. However, his imaginative theory ran into a number of problems. First, it is claimed that the soil is not hard enough to sustain repeated landings of heavy aerial craft. Secondly, why did the alleged extraterrestrials not design something far more sophisticated? Thirdly, many lines are only 3 feet wide - too narrow for aircraft. In addition, von Daniken has failed to explain the meaning or purpose of the animal geoglyphs.

The foremost expert on the Nazca Lines is undoubtedly Maria Reiche, a German mathematician who has devoted more than fifty years of her life to the study and protection of the Lines. Reiche has led a determined effort to discredit the von Daniken theory of extraterrestrials. The strategy of this attack has been to argue that the Nazca Indians constructed the Lines relatively recently - some time between 300 BC and AD 800. In support of this possibility, some scientists have put forward ingenious ideas on how the geoglyphs could theoretically have been designed from the ground. The more important evidence, however, is that which attempts to link the Lines definitively to the Nazcan culture. Here, neither of the two key pieces of evidence survive close scrutiny.

The first piece of evidence is a series of radiocarbon dates, based on ceramic and wood remains which were left at the Lines by the Nazcan people. It is claimed that this proves that the Nazcans constructed the Lines. On the contrary, the dating of these materials tells us only that the Nazcans lived in the area of the Lines. Since the Lines themselves cannot be radiocarbon dated, the possibility remains that they already existed when the Nazcan culture emerged.
The second piece of evidence is the alleged resemblance of the Nazca geoglyphs to certain features found on Nazcan pottery. This is an important issue because it potentially offers proof that the Nazcans had either designed the images or at least viewed them from the air.

In 1968, a study by the National Geographic Society determined that, whilst some of the Nazca lines did point to the positions of the Sun, Moon and certain stars two thousand years ago, it was no more than could be expected by mere chance. In 1973, Dr Gerald Hawkins studied 186 lines with a computer programme and found that only 20 per cent had any astronomical orientation - again no more than by pure chance. In 1982, Anthony Aveni obtained similar results, whilst in 1980, Georg Petersen pointed out that Reiche’s theory did not explain the different lengths and widths of the lines. More recently, Johan Reinhard has noted that the surrounding mountains provided a ready-made and much more effective mechanism for the Nazcans to use as a solar calendar; the lines would thus have been quite superfluous to them. In addition to this avalanche of scientific opinion, we should also note that Reiche, like von Daniken, has failed to explain the significance of the animal geoglyphs.

References:
Archaeological Explorations in Nazca, Peru by A.L. Kroeber, Donald Collier, Patrick H. Carmichael
Arrival of the Gods: Revealing the Ancient Landing Sites at Nazca by Erich von Daniken
Broken Images: The Figured Landscape of Nazca by David Parker
Encyclopedia of the Strange by Daniel Cohen
Encyclopedia of Strange and Unexplained Phenomena by Jerome Clark and Nancy Pear
Lines to the Mountain Gods: Nazca and the Mysteries of Peru by Evan Hadingham

Tag: The Nasca Geoglyphs