A very large contribution to the study of the geoglyphs of the Nazca desert was made by the German mathematician Maria Reiche. She was born in Dresden on May 15, 1903. All her life she was interested in only one question - why did some ancient civilization leave many geoglyphs in the Nazca desert?
And to solve this riddle, she went to Peru. In 1932, she got a job as a governess for the children of a German diplomat in the city of Cuzco.
Unfortunately, medicine at that time left much to be desired, especially in that country - Maria was injected with a cactus, after which she fell ill with gangrene and lost two fingers on her hand.
Subsequently, she joked about the fact that one of the geoglyphs in the Nazca valley was called "Hand", but only one of the "hands" had five fingers, and the other had only four.
Two years later, Maria ended up in the capital of Peru, where she taught German and worked as a translator. It was here that she met the famous explorer from the United States Paul Kosok, a meeting with whom she turned her whole life.
He was one of the first people to take aerial photographs of the Nazca geoglyphs, and who could see their real size and shape. Maria liked the photos very much. In those days, the situation here was very turbulent - and this is understandable, because it was on the eve of World War II.
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Moreover, there were no tourists here at all. And since Since she spent a lot of time with the geoglyphs, the local authorities began to consider her a German spy. And the locals thought she was crazy.
Already during the Second World War, in 1940, Reiche and Kosok suggested that these drawings represent the constellations of a very ancient astronomical calendar and were made in order to observe the course of heavenly bodies in the sky.
They have a very strange theory. Nevertheless, Maria really believed in her. For example, she believed that the monkey geoglyph means the Big Dipper, according to which representatives of ancient civilizations tried to predict the onset of the rainy season.
She presented all the information she received in her famous book "The Mystery of the Desert". However, the scientific world reacted to her work very cool and even negative.
Maria was so passionate about the research of geoglyphs that she walked several hundred kilometers through the desert, and did it completely free of charge, on only one enthusiasm.
It was she who convinced the local authorities not to let a huge number of tourists and road transport here, ensured that this place became protected by UNESCO and donated a lot of money for the construction of an observation tower from which all this beauty could be observed.
By the end of her life, in 1992, she received the citizenship of this country, and her books were reprinted and sold in large editions around the world.
Until the end of her days, she did not stop scientific activities, even being in a wheelchair. Maria passed away in 1998 from cancer.
It was she who created the data map of the drawings, which is still considered very detailed and is still used by many scientists from all over the world.