The civilizations that have gone into the past have left riddles for modern man, the best minds of historians and archaeologists are thrown to solve. A number of mysteries have an explanation, but some for centuries remain a mystery that scientists cannot explain. One such mystery is the giant drawings in the Nazca Valley in South America.
Geoglyphs
The Nazca Plateau is located in the southern part of Peru and covers an area of approximately 7 by 50 kilometers. Since ancient times, local residents have paid attention to the stripes stretching tens of meters along the valley, believing that they were made to help travelers navigate. Some stripes were straight, some had a different shape - one way or another, until mankind invented air transport, no one could see the entire patterns.
When the American archaeologist Paul Kosok saw the stripes in 1939, an amazing thing was revealed to the world: various figures were drawn on the plateau, both geometric and depicting animals, plants and people.
There are 30 drawings on the plateau - images of humans, plants and animals, 700 geometric shapes - mostly triangles and trapezoids, as well as 100 spirals and about 13 thousand straight lines. All of them were created no later than the 8th century AD and can only be recognized and seen from the air.
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The dry climate allowed the lines to remain unchanged for centuries - the trenches, which exposed light gravel under the dark surface of the local semi-desert soil, have retained their shape to the present day.
Most of the lines are perfectly straight furrows running through hills, dry riverbeds, without the slightest deviation from the straight line. The furrow is 135 centimeters wide and 50 centimeters deep; the average depth is about 30 centimeters. The length of the lines ranges from 50 to 190 meters.
Patterns applied to the ground, geoglyphs, pose a large number of questions for researchers - by whom are they applied, how, when and why?
History of the study of the Nazca lines
The Nazca geoglyphs were reported back in 1553 by the Spanish traveler, geographer and priest Pedro Cieza de Leon. He counted them as signs to determine the path.
Maria Reiche.
The study of the lines was started by Maria Reiche, an archaeologist who learned about the existence of geoglyphs from Paul Kosok. Since 1941, Reiche has explored the Nazca Plateau for several decades, manually measuring over 700 figures and mapping patterns and images. Among the drawings were found "monkey", "hummingbird", "spider", as well as a figure called "astronaut" - about 30 meters long.
Geoglyph & quot; Hands & quot;.
An amazing coincidence - one of the geoglyphs depicts hands, one of which has five fingers and the other has four. Maria Reiche was missing one finger on her left hand.
In the process of studying the phenomenon of Nazca geoglyphs, researchers now and then come across facts that are difficult to explain. For example, the fact that next to the lines there are no traces of their creators, trails, evidence of the use of tools. In this regard, a version has been expressed that they were scribbled from the air with some special object resembling a giant pencil.
Geoglyph & quot; Astronaut & quot;.
Currently, large-scale studies of the Nazca geoglyphs are not carried out due to material reasons - the Peruvian authorities do not finance the work. On the territory of the plateau, a reserve has been created to preserve ancient patterns.
Versions
Maria Reiche suggested that astronomical (as well as astrological) predictions were the goal of drawing multi-meter patterns on the plateau. The ancient peoples could determine the position of the Sun, stars along the lines and thus keep the calendar. Currently, the version about the astronomical purpose of lines and patterns is being disputed by scientists.
Geoglyphs of the Palpa plateau.
A certain oddity is also represented by the fact that the attention of the German researcher was completely deprived of the neighboring Palpa plateau - located 20 kilometers north of Nazca. Meanwhile, this territory also contains many drawings on the surface of the earth, and, unlike the Nazca images, it can boast not one "little man", but a dozen.
Scientists agree on one thing - the lines were created before the arrival of the Inca civilization on these lands, that is, earlier than the 8th century, and most likely, the creation of geoglyphs is the result of the activities of the disappeared Nazca civilization, which existed until the 6th century AD.
Whether unknown creators of patterns addressed their deity, or communicated with some extraterrestrial civilization, new generations of scientists have to find out. Among them is Victoria Nikitsky, a former assistant to Maria Reiche, who continues to work on the study of the Nazca geoglyphs.