Nazca Lines

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On the Pampa de Jumana there is almost nothing to see. The ground is a coarse gravel of dark, iron-stained stones, flat to the horizon under a hard light, and running across it are shallow scuff-lines — furrows a hand’s-breadth deep where someone lifted the dark stones aside and heaped them along the edges, baring the pale earth beneath. To walk one is to find only a path, a paler track underfoot bending away over a low rise. No vantage on the ground makes a picture of the largest of these tracks; a person standing inside a figure ninety meters across cannot see the figure at all. Only from altitude, from the window of a small plane banking over the plateau, does the same scuffing resolve into a hummingbird drawn in one unbroken line, its bill outstretched, its wings spread across the desert floor. The gap between the modest hand-work at foot level and the enormity the sky reveals is the whole difficulty of the place. It is a difficulty that has invited every kind of answer, the wildest of them projected from the air the figures seem to address. The harder and better questions begin lower down, on the pampa itself, among the moved stones.

A picture made by subtraction

The Nazca Lines are drawings made not by adding a mark but by taking one away. The desert pavement of Peru’s south coast is a thin layer of stones darkened over ages by a coat of iron and manganese oxides — the sheen geologists call desert varnish — lying over a paler yellow-gray subsoil. To draw here is to remove: the makers cleared the dark surface pebbles from a narrow band and set them aside, exposing the light ground as a bright line against the dark field, cutting only some ten to fifteen centimeters into the surface. The method is almost absurdly simple, and it is the reason the works survive. This is one of the driest places on Earth; rain almost never falls, the ground is stable, and the steady daytime winds carry little sand to bury what has been cut. A furrow scraped two thousand years ago holds its edge as though it were scraped last season.

The corpus was made largely by the Nazca, the culture that flourished in the Río Grande de Nazca drainage from roughly 100 BCE to 800 CE, though the earliest figurative geoglyphs are attributed to the preceding Paracas people, and scholars date the whole field broadly to between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. It sprawls across a plateau some eighty kilometers wide between the modern towns of Nazca and Palpa, in the Ica region about four hundred kilometers south of Lima; the protected property reaches over seventy-five thousand hectares, and the geoglyphs are scattered across some four hundred and fifty square kilometers of it, with the densest concentration packed into a rectangle only a few kilometers on a side.

Aerial view of the Nazca hummingbird geoglyph. Unukorno, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

What is scored into the plain falls into three registers, and keeping them apart is the beginning of understanding the site. There are the biomorphs — the figurative images, upward of seventy of them in the older mapping and, since a recent survey, many more: a hummingbird about ninety-three meters long, a condor stretching to a hundred and thirty-four, a monkey some ninety-three by fifty-eight meters with a great coiled spiral for a tail, a spider around forty-seven meters, and beside them a killer whale, a dog, a pelican, a heron, flowers and other plants, and a standing humanlike figure set into a hillside that early observers nicknamed “the astronaut.” There are the lines proper: more than eight hundred of them, some dead straight for kilometers, climbing hill and dropping into hollow without a waver. And there are the geometric forms — hundreds of trapezoids, triangles, spirals, and broad cleared rectangles, the trapezoids often opening like great pale funnels across the ground.

Two features of the figures carry most of the interpretation that follows. The first is the single-line convention: each biomorph is drawn as one continuous, unbroken path that enters the figure, traces its entire outline, and exits again without ever crossing itself — a line to be followed rather than a shape to be filled. The second is the scale. The largest works are legible as images only from the air, and this is not because they were made for the sky but because they are simply too big for any earthbound eye to take in whole. That single fact — enormous drawings their own makers could never have seen entire — is the hinge on which every theory of the pampa turns.

The largest astronomy book

The first sustained reading of the lines made them a map of the heavens. The American scholar Paul Kosok, working on the pampa in the early 1940s, watched the sun set along the axis of one long line near the June solstice and concluded that the desert was an observatory laid flat — he pronounced it the largest astronomy book in the world. The idea was taken up and defended for nearly forty years by Maria Reiche, a German-born mathematician who settled beside the pampa, measured the figures almost single-handedly, and argued that line after line was a sightline aimed at the rising or setting points of the sun, the moon, and the stars, the whole field a calendar for reckoning the agricultural year.

The astronomical reading has not survived testing. When the archaeoastronomer Anthony Aveni and, independently, the astronomer Gerald Hawkins put the lines to a statistical test — measuring their bearings and asking how many pointed at any solstice, equinox, or bright star — they found that only a small fraction aligned with any celestial target, no more than would be expected from lines pointing in random directions across a plain crowded with them. With so many lines running so many ways, some were bound to hit the sun or a star by chance; the pattern that a genuine calendar would show was not there. The calendar, as an account of what the pampa is for, quietly fell away. What did not fall away was the question Kosok and Reiche had at least framed correctly: these are deliberate, engineered directions across a landscape, and they were made to be meant. If not the sky, then what were they pointed at?

Walking for water

The answer that now commands the most support looks not up but down and outward — toward the one thing that governs every life on this coast. In a desert where the rivers run on the surface only briefly and vanish into the gravel for the rest of the year, the dominant interpretation reads the lines and trapezoids as a ritual apparatus for petitioning water and fertility. Aveni, the mountaineer-archaeologist Johan Reinhard, and the German Archaeological Institute team of Markus Reindel and Johny Isla have argued, from the orientation of the figures and the debris found upon them, that the straight lines and the great cleared trapezoids were processional spaces — paths to be walked in ceremony, and grounds to gather on. Many of the lines are aimed toward the foothills and peaks from which the rain clouds gather and the rivers descend; the trapezoids cluster near the watercourses and the places where water surfaces. The single-line biomorphs, on this reading, were themselves made to be walked, traced on foot in rites whose subject was the coming of water and the fertility of the fields. The animals reinforce it — the spider, the hummingbird, the killer whale belong, in Andean thought and on Nazca pottery alike, to the imagery of rain and abundance, and they play on the ground the roles they play on the painted pots.

Aerial view of the Nazca spider geoglyph. Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The water-reading does not float free of the culture that made the lines; it sits inside a whole civilization organized around wringing water from an arid country. The same people who scored the pampa also built the puquios — filtration galleries that reach the water table beneath the dry riverbeds and lead it, by gently graded underground channels marked at the surface by spiraling stone-lined shafts, out to the fields; dozens of them still water the modern valley after more than a millennium. And the lines belong to a sacred geography whose center was Cahuachi, the great adobe ceremonial complex on the south bank of the Nazca River, a pilgrimage place rather than a city, toward which some of the lines appear to lead. The pampa, in short, was not an isolated riddle but one instrument in a landscape of water-work, part ritual and part engineering, addressing by procession and petition the same scarcity the puquios addressed by excavation.

Read this way, the field of radiating lines invites a comparison the Andes would make explicit a thousand years later. In the imperial capital of Cuzco the Inca would organize the sacred landscape as the ceque system — sight-lines radiating from the temple of the sun out to hundreds of shrines, walked and tended by the kin-groups assigned to them, binding water sources, ancestors, and the calendar into a single order etched across the land. The Nazca lines are not an Inca work; the Nazca precede the Inca by roughly a millennium, and the resemblance is an analogy, not a descent. But it is an illuminating one: both are landscapes made legible by walking, in which a straight line drawn toward a mountain or a spring is at once a direction, a devotion, and a claim on water. Whether every register of the pampa served this single purpose is unsettled. The biomorphs and the lines may belong to different phases and different ends, the figures perhaps older and the vast trapezoids later; a recent survey suggests the smaller relief-figures were made for individuals or small groups passing along the trails, the great line-figures for the community. The honest teaching is that the lines are a made landscape of ritual movement in a desert obsessed with water, best understood from the culture’s own concerns, and fully legible from the air not because they were addressed to it but because of their sheer, deliberate scale.

The record and its keepers

The lines were never lost — the people of the valley always knew the tracks were there — but their scale entered the modern record only in the twentieth century, and from two directions at once. From the ground, the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe came upon them in the 1920s while walking the foothills, took them for ceremonial roads, and reported them publicly in 1939. From the air, the first commercial and military overflights of the 1930s and 1940s revealed what no ground survey could: that the scattered tracks resolved, from altitude, into enormous coherent figures. The two vantages met on the pampa in the person of Maria Reiche, who spent the better part of forty years living beside the desert, measuring and cataloging the figures, sweeping the lines clear with a broom, and campaigning — against road-building, off-road drivers, and squatters — to have the plain protected. Her long stewardship made her a national figure in Peru and did as much as any excavation to preserve the site.

Protection came formally in 1994, when UNESCO inscribed the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa as a World Heritage Site, a property of some seventy-five thousand hectares held as, in the committee’s phrase, among archaeology’s greatest enigmas for their quantity, nature, and scale. The designation set a legal fence around a surface that is, by its nature, almost defenseless: a drawing ten centimeters deep in loose gravel, spread over hundreds of square kilometers, cannot be walled or roofed. What guards it is chiefly the desert’s own stillness — and, increasingly, the vigilance of the people and institutions who have taken the pampa as a charge.

False skies

Because the figures are vast, abstract, and apprehended whole only from above, they have drawn a long train of readings that mistake the view from the airplane for the intention of the makers, and the most influential of these has done real harm. In Chariots of the Gods? (1968) the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken recast the trapezoids as landing strips for extraterrestrial craft and the hillside figure as a visitor from the stars, the whole pampa an alien airfield graded by, or for, beings from the sky. Virtually every archaeologist rejects the claim as pseudoscience, and its errors are concrete: the trapezoids are cleared surface gravel, not graded runways; the makers, methods, and dating of the lines are recoverable from the archaeology itself; and one of von Däniken’s own “runway” photographs turns out to show the knee of a bird figure a few meters across. The deeper error is the premise Carl Sagan and others named — the unstated assumption that the people of the ancient Andes could not have conceived and executed such works without help from the sky. That premise is the injury. It writes the Nazca out of their own desert, erasing the engineers who bored the puquios and the potters who painted the finest ceramics of the ancient Americas in order to hand their achievement to imagined visitors.

The demonstration that no such help was needed is almost comically direct. In 1982 the investigator Joe Nickell, with a small team and nothing but wooden stakes, cord, and the simple sighting methods available to any pre-industrial people, laid out a full-scale copy of one of the larger figures — the condor — on a field in Kentucky, matching it closely to the original in a matter of days and without once leaving the ground. Scale is not evidence of magic; it is evidence of organization, of a rope and a plan and enough hands, and the Nazca had all three. The figures are continuous with the water-and-fertility imagery of Nazca pottery and belong to the religion of a real people; they need no sky to explain them, and the reading that supplies one belongs to the history of how outsiders have looked at the pampa, not to the pampa itself. That reception has its counterparts among the other great pre-Inca sacred places — the fanged oracle in its underground galleries at Chavín de Huántar, the five-thousand-year city of sunken plazas at Caral, the coastal pilgrimage of the oracle at Pachacamac — each of which the record renders as human work, and each of which the mystery-literature has at one time or another tried to assign to lost or alien hands.

A threatened surface

The lines face dangers more immediate than misreading. The coast lies in the path of El Niño, the periodic Pacific warming that turns the dry valleys into torrents; flash floods have cut across the plain and threaten to erode figures that two thousand years of drought preserved. Encroaching development, road traffic, and squatting press on the margins of the property. And there is direct human damage, sometimes by those who should have known better: in December 2014 activists from Greenpeace trespassed into the restricted zone beside the hummingbird to lay out a large cloth banner, leaving footprints in ground so fragile that a footprint can last for centuries — Peru condemned the stunt and pursued the case in its courts. In early 2018 a truck driver plowed his rig across several of the geoglyphs, leaving deep scars over a swath of the plain and damaging three figures, having left the highway, he claimed, to avoid a toll. The surface that shrugs off millennia of weather is undone in an afternoon by a tire.

Against these losses, the pampa keeps yielding. The corpus is not fixed but still being read: in 2024 a team led by Masato Sakai of Yamagata University, working with artificial-intelligence models trained on high-resolution aerial imagery in collaboration with IBM Research, reported more than three hundred newly identified figurative geoglyphs — smaller relief-type figures clustered within sight of the ancient footpaths, nearly doubling the count of known figures at a stroke. The new figures fit the walking-and-water reading rather than unsettle it, gathering along the trails where people moved on foot. The desert, far from being exhausted, is still surrendering its inventory to anyone patient enough to look — and the lasting lesson of the pampa is that the looking must be done at ground level, among the moved stones, before it is done from the air. What resolves into a hummingbird from a banking plane was made by hands that never saw it whole, in a country that almost never rains, by a people asking the mountains for water in the only script the desert would hold.

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