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Mystery
of the
Ancient
IG
Nazca
Lines
PICTURE STORY BY
LOREN
MCINTYRE
MAPYK
PAGE 718
R
ULER STRAIGHT and tack sharp, a
curious marking more than a mile
long etches the desert in southern
Peru. Wandering mule paths that cross
it only emphasize the precision of its design.
Throughout hundreds of square miles of
arid plateau, other markings abound, most
of them concentrated between the towns of
Nazca and Palpa. Known as the Nazca
Lines, they form a geometrical mélange of
quadrangles, triangles, and trapezoids;
spirals and flowers; narrow lines that ex-
tend more than five miles; and a desert
zoo of giant creatures-birds, reptiles, and
whales, a monkey and a spider.
Because some of the figures resemble
those decorating Nazca pottery, archeol-
ogists attribute the lines to the Nazcas, a
coastal people whose culture rose, flour-
ished, and declined between-roughly
speaking-100 B.C. and A.D. 700.
Making the marks must have been sim-
ple enough, though time-consuming. Clear
away a few million rocks to expose the
lighter ground beneath them, pile the rocks
in rows, and you have designs that, in this
nearly rainless region, can last thousands
of years.
But why did the ancients construct
them? Nobody really knows. There have
been many guesses --- that they were pre-
historic roads, farms, or some form of
signals or offerings to celestial beings.
Dr. Paul Kosok, the first scholar to study
the markings after they were first recog-
nized from the air in the late 1920's, specu-
lated that they constituted a giant astro-
nomical calendar, an almanac for farmers
anxious to predict the return of water to
valley streams.
A 1968 study, financed partly by the
National Geographic Society, ascertained
that some of the lines do indeed point to
solstice positions of the sun and moon in
ancient times, as well as to the rising and
setting points on the horizon of some of
the brighter stars. But, the study indi-
cates, no more than could be expected
by chance.
And so the mystery remains, including
the most tantalizing question of all: Why
did the Nazcas create immense designs
that they themselves could never see, .
designs that can be seen only from the air?
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To Puerto Caballa's.
PAGE 723
on Pacific toast, {Jmiles
Changuillo
*PAGE 724 (Top)
PAGE Z20
PAGE 721
El ingenio
₩ 9" Stony desert
PAGE 724 (Center)
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50
PAGEZUZ
PAGES 718-19
+ 2,320
Narca Lines shown in red
Elevations in fect.
Nazca
STATUTAMILES.
AK MORE THAN . YEAR . M ...
~ Route is photographed and chanted
Ap Res. moving to complete a naq
in upper left: \ National Geographi
.. .
-
I'm Brandl the pactnen would have
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El Ingenio
GE
Center)
PAC
Nazca
POR MORE THAN 25 YEARS Maria
Reiche has photographed and charted
las lineas, striving to complete a map
of the hundreds of designs and figures that
score a tableland some 30 miles long,
threaded by the Pan American Highway
(map, upper left). A National Geographic
Society grant now aids her work.
At her desk in Lima (left), the German-
born mathematician glances up from a
chart, where azimuths of lines dart off in
almost all the directions of the compass.
During fieldwork Miss Reiche sleeps on
a camp cot behind her car on the rocky,
grassless Peruvian "pampa," rising be-
fore first light for a breakfast of grapefruit
and canned milk. Despite her 72 years, she
then sets to work with a zeal as relentless
as the noonday sun.
With the reel of tape in her left hand,
she has just completed measuring one of
the sides of a trapezoidal field (right).
Seen from the air (above), it negotiates a
hillock, then branches off octopuslike over
the pampa.
Miss Reiche scorns the suggestion that
such markings may have been airfields
for outer-space visitors to earth in pre-
historic times. "Once you remove the
stones, the ground is quite soft," she says.
"I'm afraid the spacemen would have
gotten stuck."
National Geographic, May 1975
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718

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A
S IF DESIGNED AND DRAWN
by a mad geometrician, markings
great and small litter the pampa
in configurations that defy explana-
tion. They sometimes ignore topogra-
phy as well.
Trapezoids congregate on a plateau
that overlooks the Ingenio Valley
(above). Others march up -- or is it
down ?- the slopes of an old wash
beside farmers' fields (right), accom-
panied by platoons of lines that appear
to go nowhere. The looped pattern
below them lacks the precision of
many ancient lines and may be the
remains of an irrigation system.
"Throughout the pampa," says Miss
Reiche, "lines stretch for miles, cross-
ing valleys and traversing hills, never
swerving from their courses. Survey-
ors have been astonished by their
straightness."
How did the Nazcas achieve such
exactitude? Along some lines the re-
mains of posts have been found at
intervals approaching a mile. Perhaps
sighting stations with men standing
in line behind them? Perhaps.
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BATES LITTLEHALES, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER
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L
ONGER than a football field and
completely visible only from the air, a
monkey (left) leans to grasp -- nothing.
Its left hand measures more than 40 feet
across (right). Miss Reiche stands within
the whorled furrows that comprise its
tail (above).
The figure looks like any of several
monkeys-woolly, spider, or capuchin --
that live in tropical forests on the cast
slopes of the Andes, some 200 miles dis-
tant. But Nazca artists, who probably
learned of these monkeys through trade
contacts with forest peoples, weren't al-
ways accurate in anatomical detail. They
gave their monkey four fingers on one
hand, five on the other, and a prehensile
tail that curves up instead of down.
Mystery of the Ancient Nazca Lines
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Fokkeleast 000/08/08-CIA ROROF
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-----
...
``12:00106/08 ~CIA RDP9 00189R0017000800
0
& THE PAMPA FLOOR GH
the w hales sven, and other . ten
their forms down to en by the ...
illes on Nawet pot -
-
whak below .. . teatdla a the ent
" the third . enfin. At iny. the
sinto- form of a transplant
the desert right Mixhad Land
heads, trophies at . Se bral
hunting rull. Brand the the of the
potter's while. Other pois cette! .
head dangling below the whathe
body. as the draw the de.
A few of the figure. have been
identified as pre Nazca Mi- Reihe
walks the outline of a wide card
hillside figure tright: Pottery and
textile similarities link at with the
Nazad immediate Bem ....
people of the Park. . ...
1 . .
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& #.
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D
ESERT AVIARY contains 18
bird figures, including that of a
hummingbird (left), an apparent
duckling (right), and a sea bird al-
most 450 feet long (below), whose
beak is only partly shown.
"We can't be sure what their
meaning was, but we can be sure
they had meaning," says art his-
torian Alan Sawyer. "Most figures
are composed of a single line that
never crosses itself, perhaps the
path of a ritual maze. If so, when the
Nazcas walked the line, they could
have felt they were absorbing the
essence of whatever the drawing
symbolized."
BOTH BY GEORG GERSTER
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RAFTED with uncommon care, the Nazca
Lines remained much as their makers made
them. For perhaps two thousand years a spi-
der 150 feet long lay clearly in the sand, its out-
line almost undisturbed in a photograph taken in
1963 (right). Now it bears the scars of dune
buggies, jeeps, and sightseers on foot (below). A
similar fate threatens many of the markings.
For years Miss Reiche has crusaded to preserve
the lines, an effort acknowledged last January
when the Peruvian Government allotted one mil-
lion sols (about $23,000) for the purpose.
"I would like to see a viewing tower erected
near the Pan American Highway," she says, "so
that visitors will not be tempted to walk on the
lines. I used to direct people to the sites. Now I
direct them away, before all the ruins are ruined."
728
BATES LITTLEHALES, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHER,
AND SERVICIO AEROFOTOGRAFICO NACIONAL (BELOW)
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