Nazca and the Nazca Lines

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The town of Nazca is near the famous Nazca lines, the mysterious shapes in the desert made by the Nazca civilization around 500BC. These shapes are of animals, plants, people and some 'abstract' designs, and were created simply by brushing off the black top layer of desert to reveal the white sand underneath. Due to the lack of rain and tiny windstorm that 'clean' the desert, the lines have remained almost perfectly intact save for the occasional car track (and the highway built by the government before the lines' discovery).

We viewed several of the line shapes from a lookout tower and from a high hill. (You can do a fly-over in a small plane, but this was too expensive for us, and is also apparently nauseating.) We went to a local museum, and also attended a presentation on the Nazca lines in the local planetarium, which was very cute, but informative. No one knows why the lines were originally made, but different theories give them purposes such as prayers to the gods, water source markers, meeting place paths, and astronomical tools. There are SO many lines, especially straight ones criss-crossing over each other in seeming random order, that it seems improbable that they were all used as a collective for only one purpose.

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Photos

Peruvian Coast
On the way to Nazca.

"The Hands"
It looks more like a bird with feet to us. Supposedly the feature of one 'hand' only havings four fingers shows up in other artifacts, and means something, though no one is sure what.

Maria Reiche telling politicians about the lines
She lived on her own in the desert for most of her life to study the lines, and is an honourary Peruvian, honoured everywhere in Nazca (picture from a local museum.)

Comments

[anonymous]

hello0
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