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ApproverPrrercketease 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060007-6 Mystery of the | Ancient Nazca Lines PICTURE STORY BY LOREN McINTYRE 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 anxivus tu 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? Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060007-6
OR 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 te earth in pre- historic times. “Once you remove the stones, the ground is quite soft,” she says. “lm afraid the spacemen. would have gotten stuck.” National Geographic, May 1975 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060007-6
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CPYRGHT 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. “Fhroughout 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. Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060007-6
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WP TINNTTI 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 east 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 Approved For Release 2001/03/07 : CIA-RDP96-00789R001200060007-6