Archaeologists have finally solved the mystery of the Nazca desert, having learned the secret of an unknown ancient culture. Fame came to this provincial outskirts of Peru in 1947, when the first scientific publication appeared on the "lines of the Nazca desert." When, in 1968, Erich von Deniken, in his book "Memories of the Future," declared the mysterious drawings "runways of aliens", this idea firmly stuck in the minds of many people. This is how the myth was born.
For decades, scientists and amateurs have been trying to explain the riddle of these geometric patterns, stretching for kilometers and covering an area of about 500 square kilometers. In general terms, the history of their occurrence is clear. For centuries, the inhabitants of southern Peru have adorned the desert areas near the coast with mysterious signs carved on the ground. The surface of the desert is covered with dark rocks, but when you move them aside, the light sedimentary rocks below them are exposed. It was this sharp color contrast that the ancient Indians used to create their drawings - geoglyphs. The dark ground served as a background for huge figures, images of animals, and above all trapezoids, spirals, straight lines.
But what are they here for?
These signs are so large that it is believed that it is possible to understand what they represent only by taking an airplane into the sky. The mysterious lines of the Nazca Desert, included in the list of World Heritage Sites in 1994, have long attracted the attention of esoteric lovers. Who was this mysterious gallery for? For the gods, who are accustomed, while in heaven, to read in the souls of people and look at the creations of their hands? Or maybe this is the marking of an antediluvian cosmodrome built by aliens in this distant country? Or a prehistoric calendar, and the rays of the sun, falling on the earth at noon on the day of some equinox, certainly illuminated one of the lines to the delight of the priests and their fellow tribesmen? Or was it a real astronomy textbook, where the wing of a bird represented the course of the planet Venus? Or maybe these are "family marks"with the help of which this or that clan marked the lands occupied by them? Or, drawing lines on the ground, the savage Indians did not think about the heavenly and not even about the heavenly, but about the underground, and these straight lines, going into the distance of the desert, in fact marked the current of underground streams, a secret map of water sources, revealed with such daring openness, that scientific minds even now cannot guess the meaning of what is written.
There were many hypotheses, but they were in no hurry to find facts. Almost the entire history of the scientific study of mysterious drawings was reduced to the work of the German mathematician Maria Reiche, who, starting from 1946, practically single-handedly studied them, fixing their sizes and coordinates. She also protected this ancient monument, when in 1955 it was decided to turn the Nazca plateau into a cotton plantation by laying a system of artificial irrigation. This would have ruined the amazing open-air gallery (however, some of the drawings were already destroyed during the construction of highways).
Over time - thanks to all kinds of seekers of traces of "space aliens" - this desert has become world famous. However, oddly enough, a comprehensive scientific analysis of the drawings themselves and the history of their origin was not carried out. Nor has it been studied how the desert climate has changed over the past millennia. Surprisingly, almost all guesses about the origin of the secret signs that adorned the distant plateau were constructed speculatively. Few were in a hurry to come to this incredible distance in order to descend on the basis of facts. But this could probably clarify a lot in the history of the so-called Nazca culture (200 BC - 600 AD) - according to experts, “one of the most interesting and in many ways mysterious cultures of the pre-Columbian America ".
It is not even clear what is hiding more mysteries - people or huge drawings left by them. At the disposal of anthropologists who study the ancient Indians who inhabited this region of Peru, there are only mummies, remains of settlements, samples of ceramics and textiles. In addition, not far from the open-air gallery, in the town of Cahuachi, lie the ruins of a large settlement with pyramids and platforms built of adobe bricks (see ZC, 10/90). Researchers believe that it was here that the capital of Nazca culture was located. The ceramics she left behind are distinguished by their special elegance. They are characterized by a diverse range of colors: vessels are painted in red, black, brown and white. These painted vessels were considered the most beautiful in all of Ancient Peru. Their shiny walls are covered with images of severed human heads, demonic creatures, wild cats, predatory fish,centipedes and birds. Obviously, these paintings reflect the mythical ideas of the ancient inhabitants of the country, but historians can only guess about this. After all, no written evidence has survived.
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Thousands of years of Nazca
All the more reason to talk about the painstaking research carried out in this desert in 1997-2006 by specialists from various scientific disciplines. The collected facts debunk the popular explanations of the esotericists. No cosmic secrets! The Nazca geoglyphs are earthly, too earthly.
In 1997, an expedition organized by the German Archaeological Institute with the support of the Swiss-Liechtenstein Foundation for Foreign Archaeological Research began to study the geoglyphs and settlements of the Nazca culture in the area of Palpa, forty kilometers north of the town of Nazca. The place was not chosen by chance, because here the signs drawn by the ancient Indians were in the immediate vicinity of their settlements. The team leader, German historian Markus Reindel, was convinced: "If we want to understand geoglyphs, we need to look closely at the people who created them."
Near Palpa, archaeologists have found numerous remains of settlements dating back to various eras, including the ruins of stone houses and well-groomed tombs, which, however, had long been plundered. All this testified to the complex hierarchy that was established in the society that belonged to the Nazca culture. Fine ceramics and gold chains with figurines of fish and whales found in burials refuted the usual idea of the peasant character of this culture. It already has its own elite, aristocracy. Geoglyphs would not have been built without her participation.
During the excavations, Reindel and his Peruvian colleague, Joni Isla, constantly met the monuments of the so-called Paracas culture. It dates back to 800 - 200 BC. This culture became known in 1927, when the Peruvian archaeologist Julio Tello discovered 423 mummies in the desert, devoid of vegetation on the Paracas Peninsula, perfectly preserved in the local climate.
It was believed that only the late phase of this culture was represented on the territory of Nazca. However, this turned out to be a delusion. During the excavations, settlements and burial grounds were found belonging to all phases of the Paracas culture. Moreover, the similarity of ceramics and textile fabrics, the tradition of burial and building of dwellings, unequivocally prove that the Nazca culture is its direct heir. Thus, the civilization in the south of Peru arose many centuries earlier than it was generally believed. Perhaps one of its centers was the Palpa oasis.
Nearby, in the town of Pernil Alto, on the banks of the Rio Grande River, a German archaeologist found monuments of the "early Paracas" and, along with this, ceramics, "which we could not yet attribute to any era." This ceramic tradition appears to predate the Paracas culture. It is dated very approximately - 1800 - 800 BC (according to radiocarbon analysis, 1400 - 860 BC).
These are the earliest examples of fired pottery found throughout the Andean region. They were left by an unknown civilization that existed in the south of Peru in the II millennium BC. It is to her that the art of creating geoglyphs goes back.
Wednesday is stuck
Within the framework of this project, the history of the local landscape was studied for the first time. This clarified the origin of the "signs of the Nazca desert". Here, unlike other coastal regions of Peru, another mountain range - the Cordillera Coast - runs between the western ridge of the Andes and the coastline. The hollow 40 kilometers wide, separating this mountain range and the Andes, was filled with pebbles and sedimentary rocks during the Pleistocene epoch. A flat steppe area was formed - an ideal "canvas" for applying various drawings.
Several millennia ago, at the foot of the Andes, on the Nazca plateau, grass grew, llamas grazed. In this climate, people lived as “in the Garden of Eden” (M. Reindel). The archaeologist even found traces of a flood nearby. Where the desert stretches today, mud avalanches once fell after heavy downpours.
However, around 1800 BC, the climate became noticeably drier. The drought that began burned out the grassy steppe, and people were forced to settle in natural oases - river valleys. By the way, almost at the same time, the first samples of ceramics appeared in the Nazca desert.
In the future, the desert continued its offensive, getting close to the mountain ranges. Its eastern edge has moved 20 kilometers towards the Andes. People had to move to mountain valleys lying at an altitude of 400 to 800 meters above sea level.
When, around 600 AD, the climate changed again and became even drier, the Nazca culture disappeared altogether. All that remained of her were the mysterious signs inscribed on the ground - signs that there was no one to destroy. In extremely dry climates, they persisted for thousands of years.
The history of the development of the Nazca desert once again testifies to what a formidable force the desert represents in its eternal confrontation with man. Some climate change, a slight decrease in precipitation rates, which will go unnoticed by the inhabitants of temperate zones, is enough, and then in the desert, as the expedition participant, geographer Bernhard Eitel, emphasizes, "dramatic changes in the ecosystem will occur, which will have a huge impact on the lives of its people."
The Nazca culture did not perish as a result of an instant catastrophe, such as war, but was - like the Mayan culture (see "З-С", 1/07) - gradually "strangled" due to the changed environmental conditions. A prolonged drought killed her.
Happiness is when the spondylus returns
Now, having studied the very environment in which the creators of the mysterious geoglyphs lived, the researchers could begin to interpret them.
The earliest lines and drawings appeared about 3800 years ago, when the first settlements appeared in the vicinity of Palpa. South Peruvians have created this open-air gallery among the rocks. On brownish-red stones, they scratched and carved various geometric patterns, images of people and animals, chimeras and mythological creatures. Archaeologists have found thousands of rock carvings in the area, ranging in size from a few centimeters to several meters. This grand exhibition of petroglyphs began to be explored only in the last ten years. Presumably all of them were created in the II millennium BC, "but this cannot be asserted with certainty" (M. Reindel).
An important event takes place no later than 700 BC. Petroglyphs are being replaced by drawings that are no longer applied on rocks, but on the ground. Removing the top layer of gravel, unknown artists of the Paracas culture create on the slopes of river valleys "graffiti" ranging from 10 to 30 meters - mainly images of people and animals, sometimes stars. For that time, these pictures were grandiose. But this is just the beginning. Many more centuries will pass before the famous "alien runways" appear.
Presumably around 200 BC, a real "revolution in art" takes place in the Nazca desert. Artists, who previously covered with paintings only rocks and slopes, undertake to decorate the largest "canvas" given to them by nature - the plateau stretched out in front of them. “A certain creator traced the contours of the future figure, and his assistants removed stones from the surface” - this is how Markus Reindel imagines the course of work.
For the masters of monumental graphics, who had a thousand-year tradition behind them, there was a lot to turn around here. True, now, instead of figurative compositions, they prefer works a la Mondrian: geometric shapes and lines. They reach gigantic proportions, but, in essence, there is nothing extravagant, "cosmic" in them. A pair of straight lines, no matter how you extend them, will remain just a pair of straight lines, and in order to understand this, you do not need to sit in the cockpit of a sports plane. Of course, in the Nazca desert there are also huge images of animals (monkey, spider, whale), which are better to admire from somewhere from a dais, but these drawings are rare.
“Everywhere, including in the archaeological literature, it is certainly said that the geoglyphs can at best be viewed from a bird's eye view,” says archaeologist Karsten Lumbers, a member of the expedition. - This is not true! It is enough to visit this area to make sure that these signs are clearly visible from the ground."
About two-thirds of the geoglyphs are clearly visible from anywhere in the surrounding area. “In general, they were not created to be considered,” emphasizes Reindel. Rather, they were part of an open-air "sanctuary". They can be called "ceremonial figures". Archaeological research has shown that these lines have a purely practical (more precisely, mystical) purpose.
At the corners and ends of the drawings, structures of stone, clay and raw bricks towered (in total, researchers counted about a hundred such ruins). They contained the remains of textile fabrics, plants, crayfish, guinea pigs and spondylus shells - presumably sacrificial gifts. Archaeologists have interpreted these finds as altars or miniature temples that were used in certain rituals. Which ones?
The shells of the spondylus attracted special attention. Throughout the Andean region, these beautiful shells were considered symbols of water and fertility. However, this mollusk lives in tropical waters - almost 2,000 kilometers north of the Nazca desert - and penetrates to its shores only when El Niño comes. Then the warm sea current deviates far to the south, and heavy rainfall falls on the coast of Peru. Obviously, from ancient times, people associated the appearance of spondylus with the approaching downpours. An unusual sink brought water to the fields and happiness to families. By sacrificing it on the altar, the inhabitants of the desert hoped to pray to the sky for rain.
Next to the drawings, the researchers found many vessels buried in the ground, apparently during the performance of some rituals. Holes were also noticed, into which - judging by their diameter and depth - masts up to ten meters high were erected; they must have fluttered cloths (on ceramic vessels we have already seen images of similar masts decorated with flags).
According to geophysical studies, the soil along the lines (their depth reaches almost 30 centimeters) is very strongly compacted. Especially trampled are 70 drawings depicting animals and certain creatures (they make up about a tenth of all ground "graffiti"). It looks like crowds of people have walked here for centuries! This entire area was the venue for various festivals associated with the cults of water and fertility. “There were some kind of processions, perhaps with music and dancing, as the drawings left on the ceramic vessels show,” Reindel said. These images are reminiscent of how those festivities were held (or "conversations with the gods"?). We see people on them drinking maize beer or playing a pipe, marching or dancing, making sacrifices and praying to the gods to give them rain. Such processions can still be seen in the Andes today.
Such ceremonies were of great symbolic significance. When a clan created or changed geoglyphs, it openly demonstrated to its neighbors: we live here! This act was truly a religious act. “That is why we do not find any sanctuaries in the Indian settlements - not even in Cahuachi. For them, all nature was a temple,”Reindel says.
The creation of huge drawings, like, for example, the construction of pyramids in other parts of America, required the combined efforts of a large number of people. Again, recent research has shown that these drawings did not appear once and for all in the form in which scientists and enthusiasts of "space messages" found them. Geoglyphs were repeatedly altered, expanded and transformed.
The arid climate has made the inhabitants of the Nazca desert great artists and engineers. Even Maria Reiche, describing the drawings found in the desert, noted: “The length and direction of each segment were carefully measured and recorded. Rough measurements would not be enough to reproduce the perfect shape that we see through aerial photography; a deviation of only a few inches would distort the proportions of the drawing."
Already in the first millennium BC, the ancient Peruvians learned to pump groundwater into cisterns through pipes laid underground, creating reserves of life-giving moisture. The ingenious system of canals they built, including underground ones, is still used by local residents today.
Once upon a time, using this network of canals, the ancient Indians irrigated fields on which they grew beans and potatoes, pumpkins and cassava, avocados and peanuts. The main materials that they used on the farm were cotton and reed. They caught fish with nets, and hunted seals. They made thin-walled ceramics, which were painted with bright, colorful scenes.
By the way, the oblong head was considered the ideal of beauty among the locals, and therefore the babies were tied to the forehead with boards to deform the skull while it was growing. They also practiced craniotomy, and some of those operated on lived long enough after this procedure.
But the time allotted to the Nazca culture was already running out.
The drier it became on the plateau, the more often the priests had to perform magical ceremonies in order to invoke rain. Nine out of ten lines and trapezoids are directed towards the mountains, from where the saving rains came. For a long time, magic helped, and the clouds that brought moisture returned, until around 600 AD the gods were finally angry with the people who settled in this land.
The largest drawings that have appeared in the Nazca desert date back to the time when the rains practically stopped here. In the imagination, the following picture is drawn. People literally beg the harsh god of rain to heed their suffering. They hope that at least these signals given to him, he will notice. So, polar explorers, lost in the ice, paint the tent red so that someone flying across the sky can see the sign of their trouble. But the Indian god remained, as modern geographers testify, blind to these entreaties, imprinted in the flesh of the earth. It did not rain. Faith was powerless.
In the end, the Indians left their native, but harsh land and went in search of a flourishing country. When, after several centuries, the climate became milder and people settled again on the Nazca plateau, they did not know anything about those who once lived here. Only the lines on the ground, receding into the distance or intersecting, reminded that either the gods descended to earth here, or people tried to talk to the gods. But the meaning of the drawings was already forgotten. Only now scientists begin to understand why these letters appeared - these huge "hieroglyphs", it seems, are ready to survive eternity.
However, it would be wrong to call the only spectators of these drawings some gods immersed in either nirvana or universal laziness. These lines are more "a scene, not a painting," Reindel believes. True, he himself does not undertake to judge why the lines are located this way, and not otherwise, why they form this or that pattern.
Obviously, this had a religious background, but due to the lack of collected facts, scientists continue to argue about the religion of the people who inhabited the Nazca desert for two millennia, to argue about the nature of their society and its political structure. This desert still holds many mysteries. But they will have to be solved without the participation of esotericists. There is too much earthly, everyday, vain in these “secrets of the Nazca desert”.
There was no life in the world of artists without miners
In 2007, American and Peruvian archaeologists discovered a mine in the Nazca desert, where almost two thousand years ago, long before the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, they mined iron ore - hematite. Then this mineral was ground into powder, preparing bright red ocher, according to the American researcher Kevin Vaughan.
“Archaeologists know that the peoples of the New and Old Worlds mined iron ore thousands of years ago,” explains Vaughan. - In the Old World, namely in Africa, they started doing this about 40 thousand years ago. It is known that the peoples who inhabited Mexico, Central and North America in ancient times also mined minerals containing iron. However, for a long time archaeologists could not find a single ancient mine, until a few years ago their attention was attracted by a cave in the south of Peru. Its area was about 500 square meters.
During the excavations, stone tools, fragments of dishes, cotton and wool fabrics, shells, vessels hollowed out of pumpkins, and corn cobs were found here. Radiocarbon analysis has shown that organic materials are between 500 and 1960 years old. According to archaeologists, during this time about 700 cubic meters of rock with a total mass of about 3700 tons were extracted from the mountain - and all in order to get the coveted ocher, which the inhabitants of the surrounding areas needed. It was used to paint ceramic vessels and fabrics; the Indians used it to paint their bodies and the clay walls of houses. The Iron Age did not begin in this land of artists.
“In the Old World, metals were used to make various weapons or weapons,” notes Vaughan. "In America, they were only a matter of prestige, an adornment of the nobility."
Who punished the pyramid?
In the fall of 2008, thanks to photographs taken from space, Italian researchers discovered a pyramid in the Nazca desert, which was covered up many centuries ago. Its base area was almost 10 thousand square meters. The pyramid was erected one and a half kilometers from Cahuachi by people belonging to the Nazca culture. Presumably it consisted of four terraces located one above the other. “The structure of the terrain is especially visible in satellite photographs, as sun-dried clay bricks are very different in density from the adjacent soil,” explains research leader Nicola Mazini.
The inhabitants of Cahuachi buried this pyramid, like many other buildings, under a layer of sand after two catastrophes broke out in the vicinity, one after another: a flood, and then a strong earthquake. Obviously, archaeologists believe that after these disasters, the local priests lost faith in the magical power of the pyramid and … buried it. This was done with the rest of the buildings. However, this conjecture is rather speculative. Nobody knows what really happened then.
Source: "Knowledge is Power"