|
|
|||||
|
|
Home
|
|
What is a Nazca? The Nazca Desert is a
high plateau about sixty miles long and five miles wide on the coast of Peru,
some 250 miles south of Lima. At some time before 1000 BCE, the Nazca Valley was
inhabited by a people who developed advanced farming methods that allowed
them to build an irrigation system, improve their crops, and expand the area
of land they could farm. Over the next 1,500 years, they also developed
outstanding skills in weaving, pottery, and architecture. The Nazca were
wiped out after the Spanish conquest, so that piece of history is quite
blank. Perhaps the most fascinating of their cultural achievements was the
creation of a remarkable ground art -- the exact purpose of which remains a
mystery Occasional travelers
through Nazca had doubtless noticed the strange and obviously artificial
lines in the desert floor, but the lines were unimpressive and meaningless at
ground level. As planes began to pass over the Nazca region, air travelers
saw that some of the lines formed parts of gigantic figures whose shape could
only be appreciated from the air. Aerial photographs of the region proved to
be highly dramatic. Therein lies the mystery. Why would anyone bother to make figures that could only be appreciated from the air in an era when there were no airplanes? It is well established that these drawings are at least fifteen hundred years old. Archaeologists have
developed several explanations for this: one is that the figures, probably of
religious significance, were not meant to be seen as a while by human eyes; a
second is that the Nazca people built balloons that allowed them to view the
figures when they flew over the sites. This suggestion, while not impossible,
lacks supporting evidence. |
SPONSORS
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
History
|
|
|||
|
|
|||||
|
|
Schedule |
|
|||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
Links
|
|
|||
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
||||
