Mysterious Places: The Nazca Lines of Peru

The Nazca Lines of Peru are one of the worlds greatest mysterious. While a few references were made about the lines by Spanish chroniclers in the 17th century, the Nazca lines lay unnoticed until the early 1920s when archaeologist Julio Tello first recorded the designs. The patterns however, only started to receive major attention after Dr. Paul Kosok, an American archaeologist and his wife noted the designs during a trip to Nazca in 1941.

The figures lie in an area that is one of the driest places on earth. The ground is made of light yellow soil, a mixture of sand, clay and calcite. The Nazca lines and designs were made by scraping away rocks, revealing the yellow soil that lay beneath. It is assumed that this was done entirely by hand, as archaeologists have never found evidence showing the work was done by plow animals.

The accurateness of the lines is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nazca lines. There are countless lines that vary in width and length. They fan out in all directions, often times intersecting with one another to create a grid. The lines vary in lengths from just a few feet long, to an astonishing 40 miles long.

The animals depicted are also amazingly accurate and proportioned. There is a large variety of designs besides the straight lines depicted on the desert floor. The animal figures include images of a spider, birds, a monkey, a whale, a llama, a snake and a lizard. The spider figure is one of the more popular and the most intriguing.

The spider that is depicted in Nazca is a member of the genus, Ricinulei, which is one of the rarest genus of spiders in the world. This species of spiders are only found in inaccessible places of the Amazon jungle. These spiders feature one extended leg with a reproductive organ on its tip. This copulatory mechanism is generally only visible when viewed by a microscope, and difficult, if not impossible to see with the naked eye. Yet, the image of this spider on the Nazca desert floor does indeed show this part of the spider!

Some of these animals designs are quite enormous in size. The lizard is more than 590 feet long, the spider is measured at 148 feet long and the hummingbird is about 82 foot long. The fact that these designs are so accurate and show such detail for such large specimens as they are, is indeed an amazing feat for their creators.

So who were these creators? General consensus is that the Nazca lines were created by the Nazca Indians between the thousand year period of 500 BC and 500 AD. Little is known about the Nazca Indians. Most of what we know about them, comes from their graves. They preceded the Incas and lived in the southern coastal region of present day Peru. They left behind no evidence of a written language, though the art work and styling of their pottery suggest they were a simple people, agriculturalists and dedicated to the natural world and all living creatures.

There are of course, countless theories as to why the lines were created. Some people believe them to be a sort of astronomical calender that predicts the positions of our celestial bodies above. Some say that this helped the Nazca Indians determine the proper time of the year for planting and harvesting. Some people believe that they have a religious explanation, and the the creators used them in some way for their religious worships and practices. And other people even believe the lines were created by descendants of the lost continent of Atlantis as a way to communicate with other survivors.

Why this group of people chose to create these lines in the middle of the Peruvian desert, the world may never know. That however, will not stop us from dreaming of their meanings, nor will it inhibit us from being amazed by their beauty.