The mystery of the Nazca lines
Nazca is a locality in Peru that gave its name to the civilization of the same name between the 3rd and 10th centuries. It is a 520-square-kilometer area in the Andes where hundreds of perfectly aligned lines were traced in ancient times to form huge geometric patterns depicting figures mainly of animals. Such images, called geoglyphics, are huge and scattered across the pampas surrounding the city of Nazca, one of the most barren and arid territories on the planet, where very little rain has fallen in the last ten thousand years, and where a footprint left by man or animal would remain as evidence of its passage for decades.
Located in the foothills of the Andes, which take on a somber purplish-black color here, this territory is composed mainly of sand, clay and calcite, broken occasionally by sharp fragments of reddish rock. Their presence was all but ignored except for a few scattered notes left by Spanish chroniclers around 1600. The first to take note of the drawings was a Peruvian archaeologist named Julio Tello in 1926, but the actual study of the site was done by American archaeologist Paul Kosok (1941). All of Nazca's lines were simply etched by scraping the surface rock until the yellow soil beneath was bare.
Since there is no evidence or find indicating the use of trailing animals, it is safe to assume that all the work was done by hand. An untold number of rows, varying in width and length - consider that one even is 65 km long - fan out in all directions, often intersecting with each other in a seemingly random manner. Gigantic rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, bring to mind the landing strips of modern airports, while abstract shapes distributed together with animal profiles form immense patterns distributed somewhat throughout the complex network of lines that can be interpreted as UFO landing strips or more realistically were a mode of dialogue with the gods.
The most spectacular images are the spider, various types of birds, such as the condor and hummingbird, a flower (figure), monkey (figure), whale, snake, and lizard. The dimensions are cyclopean: the lizard, for example, is about 180 meters long; the birds range from a min. of 25 m to a max. of 275 m; other figures occupy the space of three soccer fields.
But the accuracy of the detail with which these figures were "drawn" is also something incredible; it was possible to proceed to the classification of the spider: it belongs to the Ricinulei group, one of the rarest arachnids in the world, whose species live only in the most inaccessible areas of the Amazon rainforest; it has at its lower end the characteristic reproductive organ, a copulatory mechanism that is normally visible only with great difficulty to the naked eye.
Scattered throughout the area, then, are thousands of stone piles, similar to the well-known European mounds, which surely had a definite purpose. Remains of wooden poles have been found near them that most likely served as reference points to control the execution of images, while on others there are clear signs of animal sacrifices. On the border of this territory there are also a series of statues and rock carvings. One of these consists of a double boulder 25 meters high, molded in the shape of a human head and covered with designs that, according to some, stand for the four races of man. A curious detail is that many of the carvings carved into the sides of the rock are visible only when illuminated by the sun, at a specific time of day or at a particular season of the year. Most of the lines were drawn over the figures themselves, indicating that the geoglyphs were executed in two stages: first the actual drawings, and, only later, the complex intricacy of lines and straight lines.
The authors of this immense work are almost certainly the Nazca Indians, a population predating the Incas, and they date from 500 B.C. to 500 A.D. This people of simple farmers, devoted to nature and all living things, however, left no descendants or evidence of writing, only a few artifacts in the thousands of tombs discovered, so the real reasons that prompted them to undertake such a mammoth work are still obscure to us, although some hypotheses, more or less suggestive, have been made.
One of the earliest references to the "Trails of Nazca" we find them in the records of a Spanish magistrate following the conquistadores, a certain Luis de Monzon, who describes the traces of some trails, of worked stone and archaeological finds of an unspecified nature and also refers to certain Viracochas, a small tribe that came from another "country" and lived before the Incas. It seems that members of this tribe were revered by the Indians who came after them and that the trails were built in their honor.
As already mentioned another hypothesis holds that the large straight lines would have represented landing strips for extraterrestrial spacecraft, but the ground in those places is too soft and does not allow the landing of any kind of aircraft. It is certain that they were not roads either, as some end suddenly at the foot or top of a mountain and others lead nowhere.
Also of great importance was the hypothesis of Paul Kosok, the first real scholar of the lines, who came to the conclusion that the lines represented an astronomical calendar. This thought was taken up by the German astronomer and mathematician Maria Reiche, who said that through the drawings it was possible to determine the right times for planting and harvesting, solstices and equinoxes, and eclipses of the sun and moon according to patterns and patterns common in ancient cultures on Earth. The large size of the images, their perfect proportions, and the exceptionally straight lines have given rise to numerous conjectures about the methods used by the Indians to make them. The straight lines may have been drawn simply by using three wooden poles as a reference point to align the lines by eye.
Another suggestive idea is that the Nazca could fly thanks to rudimentary hot air balloons, and that they controlled the course of the works, and the direction of the lines, from above, especially since the figures, given their large size, were supposedly only able to be fully appreciated by observing them from a certain height. Confirming this hypothesis are the paintings adorning the pottery found in the area that show images of objects indentifiable with hot air balloons or, at the very least, kites.
In addition, at the end of many of the drawn lines, circular holes containing blackened rocks were found, probable "burn pits" that were used to launch aerostats into the area thanks to the hot air given off by fire. When a fabric was found in the tombs of the Nazca, with a finer weave than that currently used for parachutes, but denser than that used to make hot-air balloons, Bill Spohrer, an American, decided to try to reconstruct a balloon using those materials that the Indians also supposedly used, and to have it raised starting from an ancient combustion pit itself. The Condor I, as the balloon was called, rose to an altitude of 350 meters and flew about 3 kilometers.
This therefore makes plausible the hypothesis that Nazca engineers directed the work from above: it remains to be proven that they actually did so. Finally, a religious hypothesis has been put forward, provided by other researchers, indicating that each line or track belonged to a family, or several families related by blood ties who cleaned it regularly. Near them, at particular points, such as the stone piles described earlier, a spring or a sacred hill, the memory of spirits was venerated. The larger rows and geometric shapes probably belonged to the community, and the huge designs served as religious icons on which the population gathered for various rites of deity worship.
