Mysterious Nazca Lines

Nazca Lines

The Nazca (also spelled Nasca) Lines are geoglyphs located in an arid Coastal Area of Peru that cover an estimated 170 square miles (450 square kilometers).

Scratched on the ground, they number in the thousands and depict creatures from both the natural world and the human imagination. They include animals such as the spider, hummingbird, monkey, lizard, pelican and even killer whale. Also illustrated are geometric motifs such as wavy lines, triangle, spirals and rectangles.

Some of the Nazca Lines, mysterious geoglyphs that span a vast swath of the rugged Peruvian Desert, may have once been a labyrinth with a spiritual purpose, a new study suggests.

The new insight, published in the December issue of the journal Antiquity, came because two archaeologist decided to use a decidedly low-tech method to understand the sand drawing's ancient secrets by walking it.

At the time the Nazca Lines, which span 85 square miles (220 square kilometers), were drawn, "people were not looking at this stuff from the air, they were looking at stuff form the ground level," said Timothy Ingold, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen, who was not involved in the study. "To appreciate what they might have meant to ordinary people, then you have to walk them."

While that seems like an obvious first step, in actually, very few archaeologists have studied the Nazca Lines from that vantage point, because most of the pictures drawn out by the lines are only visible from foothills above or from space.

The Nazca Lines have been a mystery since they were first discovered in the 1920's by Peruvian Archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspa. Long forgotten people from the 'Nasca' culture created the drawings between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500 by brushing away the dark top layer of barren desert to reveal the light, sandy oil underneath, wrote Clive Ruggles, an archaeologist from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, in an email. The dry, windless climate has preserved most of the carvings . Hundreds of depictions of animal shapes such as jaguars and monkeys, as well as geometric design to this day.

But just why ancient people suggested it was an alien landing strip, a primitive sun calendar, or an irrigation system.

"There is no simple answer. Different geoglyphs were clearly created over a significant period of time and almost certainly had a variety of meaning and purposes," Clive Ruggles wrote