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n September 1926, two archaeologists scrambled up the rocky slopes near the town of Nazca, in southwestern Peru. The Peruvian, Toribio Mejia, and the Ameri-can, Alfred Kroeber, intended to check out a nearby cemetery. Then, as they stopped for a moment and looked down on the flat, stony desert, they noticed a series of long, straight lines stretching to the horizon. Both scholars assumed the lines were some sort of irrigation system, and neither gave them much thought beyond that.It was not until the 1930s, when commercial airlines began flying over the desert, that pilots and passengers realized there were many more of these lines—and lots more to their origins. From the air, they could see hundreds of lines, many radiating outward from central points, some of them miles long and perfectly straight. There were also other forms, including triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, spirals, and several animal shapes. As anthropologist Anthony Aveni wrote, the view from the sky resembled an unerased blackboard at the end of a busy geometry class.
Back on the ground, archaeologists examined the lines and shapes and saw that they’d been made by simply brushing aside the pebbles that covered the desert. Under-neath was a light sand that stood out all the more clearly because the darker pebbles now formed a border alongside the lines and shapes. Archaeologists also realized that, once created, these drawings could remain in their original condition indefinitely; the desert around Nazca was so dry (receiving about twenty minutes of rainfall a year) and so windless that the lines might very well be centuries or even millennia old. Indeed, the re-mains of pottery found alongside some of the lines seemed to indicate that some were more than two thousand years old.
What, scientists wondered, could have inspired the artists of the period to choose such a difficult canvas? And why would they have drawn patterns so large that, from ground level, they couldn’t even be recognized? Perhaps, some speculated, the ancient Nazcans may have known how to fly, using some sort of primitive gliders or hot air bal-loons. Or perhaps, according to the most notorious explanation for the lines and shapes, they hadn’t been drawn by the Nazcans but by visitors from outer space; according to this theory, the lines were landing strips and the shapes were landing bays for extraterrestrial aircraft.
The extraterrestrial theory, made famous by Erich von Daniken’s worldwide best-seller Chariots of the Gods?, was pure fantasy. It was based on nothing more than a very superficial resemblance between a small segment of the desert drawings and a modern airport. But von Dainiken’s book, like the theory that the ancient Nazcans could fly, at least offered some sort of explanation for the huge and mysterious etchings.
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How else could scientists account for these lines that were drawn in the sand—but could only be seen from the sky?
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The first serious study of the Nazca lines came in 1941, when an American historian, Paul Kosok, visited the desert. Kosok, too, sought the mystery’s solution by looking to the sky. His moment of inspiration came as he was watching the sun go down. Suddenly he noticed that it was setting almost exactly over the end of one of the long lines. A moment later, he realized that it was June 22, the shortest day in the year and the day when the sun sets farthest north of due west.
“With a great thrill we realized at once that we had apparently found the key to the riddle!” Kosok later recalled. “For undoubtedly the ancient Nazcans had constructed this line to mark the winter solstice. And if this were so, then the other markings might very likely be tied up in some way with astronomical and related activities.”
Kosok had to leave the desert before he could conduct a more thorough study, so he enlisted the help of Maria Reiche, a German-born tutor of mathematics in Lima. By the end of the year Reiche had discovered that twelve other lines led to either the winter sol-Since the Nazca lines—such as this massive hummingbird—could be seen only from the air, some scientists speculated that the ancient Peruvians may have known how to fly.(Kevin Schafer/Corbis)
stice or the summer solstice. The desert, Kosok and Reiche concluded, was “the largest as-tronomy book in the world.” By marking crucial astronomical positions on the horizon, it also served as a giant calendar.
Critics of Kosok and Reiche argued that with so many lines running in so many dif-ferent directions, it could easily be just a coincidence that some of them lined up with the sun. What was needed was a more systematic approach.
In 1968 Gerald Hawkins arrived in Peru, intent on providing just that. Hawkins seemed just the man for the job. He was an astronomer rather than an archaeologist, and his computer-assisted analysis of the alignments at Stonehenge had convinced him that those ruins had once been an astronomical observatory. Hawkins started by assigning a crew to fly over the desert and take a series of photographs that were used to plot an ac-curate map of the lines. Then he fed into the computer the positions of the sun, moon, and various stars along the horizon, adjusted to take into account the changes that grad-ually occurred over the past two thousand years. Finally, he selected 186 lines from one particular section of the desert.
Hawkins found that 39 of the 186 lines matched an astronomical position. That might sound impressive, but with so many astronomical positions to choose from, it was actually a huge disappointment. About 19 lines could have been expected to match some alignment by chance alone, and many of the other matches were actually “duplicates”—where a single line led to a winter solstice in one direction and a summer solstice in the other. Moreover, more than 80 percent of the selected lines headed off in entirely random directions.
So Hawkins, the great champion of an astronomical explanation for Stonehenge, concluded that at Nazca, “the star-sun-moon calendar theory had been killed by the computer.”
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In the early 1980s the Canadian archaeologist Persis Clarkson collected the fragments of pottery found along the lines, then compared them to pottery known to come from various eras of Peruvian prehistory. Her striking conclusion was that some of the frag-ments (particularly those near the drawings of animals) dated back to between 200B.C. and A.D. 200, while others matched a style prevalent about a thousand years later.
The implications for those seeking an explanation for the lines were dramatic. If the drawings and lines had been created over such a lengthy period, and if they represented the work of people from very different eras, then they might also have served a variety of purposes. In other words, more than one explanation might apply to the lines. Or, to re-turn to Aveni’s metaphor, the blackboard may have been covered with the unerased work of not one, but many different geometry classes.
The explanations that followed in the late 1980s frequently had to do with water—not surprising, given its scarcity in the desert. Anthropologist Johan Reinhard argued that some of the lines may have connected particular points in the irrigation system with places of worship, perhaps as part of some fertility ritual. The many bird designs took on
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a new significance, especially since modern Nazca farmers interpret sightings of herons, pelicans, or condors as signs of rain; perhaps the bird and other animal drawings had been intended to invoke rain.
Two other anthropologists, Aveni and Helaine Silverman, noted that the lines corre-lated with various geographic benchmarks. Most of the lines were laid out in the same direction that water flowed after the rare desert rainstorm, and many had the same ori-entation as nearby gullies where water once ran. Aveni and Silverman didn’t think the lines had been irrigation ditches—they were far too shallow for that—but they agreed with Reinhard that there was some sort of ceremonial link between the lines and water.
Aveni also teamed up with another anthropologist, Tom Zuidema, an expert on the Incas, who’d ruled much of Peru when the Spanish arrived. Zuidema recognized that Cuzco, the Inca capital, was designed as a network of straight lines emanating from the Temple of the Sun, in the center of the city. The radial layout had religious and social sig-nificance to the Incas, according to the early Spanish chroniclers. Zuidema and Aveni concluded that the radial layout of many of the desert lines indicated that the Nazcans had similar beliefs.
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Another anthropologist, Gary Urton, looked for parallels in the practices of modern residents of mountain villages near Cuzco. Urton described how the villagers of Pacariq-tambo, during certain festivals, took part in a ritual sweeping of long, thin strips of the plaza. To Urton, it didn’t seem too much of a leap to imagine ancient Nazcans perform-ing a similar ritual on the desert lines.
Maria Reiche, meanwhile, continued to live in Nazca, acting as not just an expert on the lines but also their protector. After von Daniken’s works turned Nazca into a tourist destination, Reiche used her own limited funds to hire security guards. Even as an old woman, she would patrol the desert in her wheelchair, shooing away tourists if she feared they’d damage the lines. In Nazca she was a local hero.
In the early 1990s Reiche and her sister, Renate Reiche, became a bit too vigilant, at least according to some researchers. Maria Reiche’s guards temporarily stopped both Clarkson and Urton from working on the desert, accusing the former of stealing pot-sherds and the latter of willfully harming the plains. Perhaps, Maria Reiche’s critics sug-gested, she was trying to preserve her astronomical theory as well as the lines.
If so, Maria Reiche, who died in 1998 at age ninety-five, might have taken some con-solation from the latest astronomical analyses, conducted by Aveni and a British as-tronomer, Clive Ruggles. Like Hawkins, Aveni and Ruggles found that celestial alignments couldn’t account for the majority of the Nazca lines. Unlike Hawkins, how-ever, they concluded that there were too many alignments for all of them to be just a co-incidence. Aveni also noted that some of the radiating lines at Cuzco lined up positions of the sun, moon, and stars, leading him to conclude that astronomy did have some role at Nazca, albeit a smaller role than Kosok or Reiche envisioned.
Von Daniken’s readers, too, would undoubtedly be disappointed by the latest think-ing about the lines. The range of overlappthink-ing theories—astronomical, agricultural, reli-gious—don’t provide the same kind of satisfaction that a single explanation would. Alas, it’s highly unlikely that any single explanation could ever account for all the lines and drawings.
Still, the recent findings of Aveni, Silverman, Urton, Zuidema, and others have a great deal more in common than it might at first seem. Each of these scholars began by look-ing for connections between the Nazcans and other Peruvian cultures, old or new. And each of these connections helped make sense of the Nazca lines.
The lines have been called a “wonder of the ancient world,” implying they were some-thing so remarkable that they could not be understood in the context of anysome-thing else known about South American antiquity. But for the most recent archaeologists, anthro-pologists, and historians of Nazca, the reverse holds true: if the lines are to be understood at all, it can only be in the context of that world.
To Investigate Further
Kosok, Paul, and Maria Reiche. “The Mysterious Markings of Nazca,” Natural History (May 1947).
The astronomical thesis, with which everyone who came after had to (and still has to) con-tend.
von Daniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969).
The Nazca lines make up just one element of von Daniken’s case that aliens once visited Earth; his other “proof ” includes the Easter Island statues and the pyramids of Egypt.
Hawkins, Gerald. Beyond Stonehenge (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
In spite of his negative conclusions about Nazca, Hawkins makes a strong case for the astro-nomical sophistication of ancient humans.
Morrison, Tony. The Mystery of the Nasca Lines (Suffolk, England: Nonesuch Expeditions, 1987).
A fine popular survey, though with a great deal of not particularly interesting biographical information about key researchers. Superb photos.
Hadingham, Evan. Lines to the Mounrain Gods (New York: Random House, 1987).
An excellent summary of others’ theories, leading up to Hadingham’s own speculation that the drawings were directed at the gods on whom the Nazcans depended for water.
Aveni, Anthony, ed. The Lines of Nazca (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1990).
A collection of essays by the leading researchers, including Clarkson, Urton, Silverman, Ruggles, and Aveni himself, all offering a pan-Andean approach to the lines.
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