Nazca Lines Still Provoke Mystery

Since their startling discovery in Peru’s coastal area during the 1920s, mystery still surrounds the so-called Nazca lines, depicting several massive images decipherable only from high altitudes.

The vast majority of the lines date from 200 BC to 500 AD, to a time when a people referred to as the Nazca inhabited the region. The earliest lines, created with piled up stones, date as far back as 500 BC.

According to LiveScience.com:

The purpose of the lines continues to elude researchers and remains a matter of conjecture. Ancient Nazca culture was prehistoric, which means they left no written records.  

One idea is that they are linked to the heavens with some of the lines representing constellations in the night sky. Another idea is that the lines play a role in pilgrimage, with one walking across them to reach a sacred place such as Cahuachi and its adobe pyramids. 

Yet another idea is that the lines are connected with water, something vital to life yet hard to get in the desert, and may have played a part in water-based rituals.

In the absence of a firm archaeological conclusion a number of fringe theories have popped up, especially several aligned with “ancient astronaut” theories. A less radical suggestion is that the Nazca people used balloons to observe the lines from high altitudes, something for which there still is no archaeological evidence.

Click here for the article.

Mystery 'Wheels' Seen Only from High Above

Some of the wheels in Jordan's desert.

Thousands of mysterious ancient “geoglyphs” ~ similar in construction to Peru’s famous Nazca lines ~ have been found in the Middle East with the help of satellite-mapping technologies and aerial photography. According to LiveScience.com:

Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across. 

"In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia.  

Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said.

His research reveals that these wheels are part of a variety of stone landscapes, including stone structures used for killing animals, lines of stone cairns that run from burials, and a number of strange structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use. 

Click here for the complete article and a photo gallery.

Ruined Ecosystem May Destroyed the Nazca

A mountainside drawing by the Nazca people on now-barren land.

Archaeologists are concluding that the Nazca ~ who once flourished in southern Peru, beginning around 200 BC ~ severely damaged their surrounding ecosystem and provoked the collapse of their own civilization around 500 AD.

Known today for creating vast patterns in the desert that can only be seen from the air, the Nazca civilization disappeared partly because it damaged the fragile ecosystem that held it in place, a study found. Author Oliver Whaley, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said: ''The mistakes of prehistory offer us important lessons for our management of fragile, arid areas in the present.''

Recently published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, a new study found that the Nazca cleared forests to make way for their agriculture over the course of many generations.

According to the London Telegraph:

In doing so, the huarango tree, which once covered what is now a desert area, was gradually replaced by crops such as cotton and maize.

But the tree was crucial to the desert's fragile ecosystem as it enhanced soil fertility and moisture and helped to hold the Nasca's narrow, vulnerable irrigation channels in place, the researchers said.

The Nazca eventually cut down so many trees that they reached a tipping point at which the arid ecosystem was irreversibly damaged.

An El Nino-style flood then occurred, but its impact would have been far less devastating had the forests which protected the delicate desert ecology still been there, they said.

''In time, gradual woodland clearance crossed an ecological threshold - sharply defined in such desert environments - exposing the landscape to the region's extraordinary desert winds and the effects of El Nino floods,” according to Dr David Beresford-Jones of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University

Click here for the Telegraph article.

Peru to Protect Nazca Lines from Rainwater

A figure called La Mano (The Hand) damaged by unusual flooding.

Peru’s National Institute of Culture is preparing to protect from heavy rains the enigmatic Nazca Lines, located in the country’s southern region, according to the resident archaeologist in Nazca, Mario Olaechea.

"It's a project that will serve the whole area in general, including drainage services, to avoid events such as the one in January when rainwater accumulated and drained, covering with a clay layer of the geoglyph called La Mano", Olaechea said. "The figure has not been erased. It is still intact, only one percent was covered by the clay layer.”

In the first months of the year, heavy rains also affected the southern plains of Nazca, but without serious consequences.

Nazca Beheaded Own Brethren for Trophies

The South American people who carved the Nazca Lines across the Peruvian desert some 2,000 years ago also were great collectors of human heads, according to Discovery News.

The Nazca civilization ~ flourishing in Peru between the first century BC and the fifth century AD and sliding into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes ~ is mostly known for carving in the desert hundreds of geometric lines and images of animals and birds that can only be viewed from the air.

They also boasted the largest collection of human heads in the Andes region of South America. Carefully prepared, the lips sewed with long cactus spines, all heads featured a hole in the center of the forehead so that a carrying rope could be inserted. Hanged and suspended from these woven cords, the heads were long believed to be war trophies.

Heads Came from Own People

But recent analysis of the diet-related substances found in the teeth of some heads unearthed in 1925, reveals that the Nazca built their collection not from foreign enemies slain in battles, but from their own people.

"Nazca pottery gives us very interesting information about the role of trophy heads, both in the hands of warriors and also in ritual activities, such as burials and ritual caches. We can use sophisticated laboratory techniques to answer very interesting questions about the past, even when the excavations took place almost 100 years ago," archaeologist Kelly Knudson of Arizona State University in Tempe, told Discovery News.

Teeth Show Same Substances

Published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, the study examined 16 trophy heads of the Kroeber collection at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and 13 mummified bodies buried in the Nazca region. Knudson and colleagues compared tooth enamel from the trophy heads with the mummified bodies.

Teeth from the trophy heads and from the mummified bodies showed no substantial differences in the ratios of several chemical substances, showing that the trophy heads came from the Nazca themselves rather than from outsiders.

"Our data do not support the hypothesis that Nazca trophy heads were taken from enemy warriors from foreign locales. We argue that transforming local Nazca individuals into trophy heads highlights their ritual role," the researchers concluded.

Top photo shows Nazca terracotta representation of a trophy skull, while lower photo shows actual skulls with the forehead hole.

Click here for the Discovery News article.

Peruvian Ruins Said to be 5,500 Years Old

The ancient Peruvian settlement ruins were unearthed about nine miles from Palpa, above, south of Lima.

Peruvian and German archaeologists has discovered a 5,500-year-old human settlement near the southern town of Nazca, south of Lima.

"The find consists of a group of homes in which 19 graves were found, including the remains of a child younger than one with possible evidence of having been mummified," reported the newspaper El Comercio.

The article also said the find is the first discovery in southern Peru of an inhabited site corresponding to the late portion of the archaic period some 3,500 years before Christ.

Ornaments in Graves

One of the project researchers said that the excavations made at the site since last October enabled the team to find the remains of eight small oval-shaped and circular homes made by digging deep pits in the ground. Also found were up to 19 graves of children and adults interred individually inside the homes, which would seem to indicate that they were buried there after the homes were abandoned.

In some of the graves, archaeologists found carved bones and snail-shells, deer horns, necklaces and bracelets made from shells, but there was no concrete evidence of offerings to the dead or to dieties.

The researchers are seeking to expand their knowledge about the culture of southern Peru in the early epochs from about 5,500 years ago up to the Inca civilization in the 16th century.

Click here for the Latin American Herald Tribune article.