For Release 2001/03/07
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D
KSKRT AVIARY
contains
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.”
CPYRGHT
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:
C
RAFTED
with uncommon
care,
the Nazca
Lines remained much as their makers made
them. For perhaps two thousand years a spi-
der ISO 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 ”
0007-6
bates littlehales, national geographic photographer,
AND SERV1CIO AEROFOTOGRAFICO NACIONAL (BELOW)
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Approved For Release 2001/03/07
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: CIA-RDP96-00789R0012000
Approved For Release 2001/03/07
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Approv©f3|f«c3Mease 2001/03/07
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*
u
j
Mystery
ofthe
Ancient
Nazca
Lines
PICTURE STORY BY
LOREN
McIntyre
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 melange 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
anxiuuft
iu 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?
716
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F
OR MORE THAN 25 YEARS Maria
Reiche has photographed and charted
las
tineas, striving to complete a map
of the hundreds of designs and figures that
score
a
tableland
some
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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