Peru: Mysterious Nazca March 7 - 9/2011

---

Nazca

Nazca would have been a sleepy village if Paul Kosok had not seen in 1930 some strange lines in the pampas around. Now it is a vivid city with restaurants and hotels to welcome all those would be archaeologists from all over the world. Each with his own theory to explain the existence of the remarkable drawings and endless lines. The meaning of the drawings becomes clear only when you see them from some height. From a plane e.g. But there were no planes 1600 years ago. So what did the Nazca culture (to whom the drawings are attributed) move to make drawings, they could not see?

We stand on a metallic tower (El Mirador) from where you can overview two of the drawings. A hot wind comes from the stone desert. Every now and then a little tornado comes to life. Sometimes they cross the highway behind us, which leads to Nazca, some 20 kilometers from here. Two kilometer further on is a hill, from where you can see the endless lines which disappear behind the horizon. It is the second time I am here and the only conclusion I can draw is that the lines are still there after 35 years.

Erich von Daeniken saw after a quick glance immediately that the lines were the work of extraterrestrials. The whole world swallowed his book 'Chariots of the Gods' and lots of people believed it. That von Daeniken served three years in Swiss prisons for fraude was less known.
Mathematician Maria Reiche spent her whole life on studying the drawings. She came to the conclusion the lines might (!) be an agricultural calendar. Nearly not a soul read her book ' The Mystery of the desert' and no one believed her. Agriculture in a superdry stonedesert? Nonsense. It is the sour story of an assiduous scientist.
At the Chauchilla cemetery we stand eye in eye with the mummies of the Nazca culture. Everything is in a good condition, the clothes, the potteries around the mummies. Some mummies have long hair and we can see the eyes. It looks like the mummies are burried in a foetal position, so that they can start a new life again. So, these people took the secret of the Nazca lines with them in their graves.

At the Museo Didactico Antonini we learn more about the Nazca culture. We see deformated skulls. Some skulls have a hole. Is it a trepanation? I remember I saw lots of skulls with trepanations here in the past. I made my own theory around it. Light could come into the brains were the third eye is. The third eye is an eyelike structure and is sensitive for light. It makes a hormone, called melatonine, which takes part in biological rhythms. Light inhibits the production of melatonine. Maybe the Indians got a better feeling of it. In the seventies a man in Amsterdam made a hole in his skul to get higher feelings.
But the holes here are not for getting higher feelings. The museum makes clear that the skulls were trophees and the holes served to hang them on a rope. Gone is my beautiful theory. Falsified after 35 years.

In the same museum we see the seeds of all kind of crops the Nazca people used to cultivate. It must have been green here in the past. And full of water. Climat has changed. The cold Humboldt stream causes the dryness here. Occasionally however El Niño comes to the south, replacing the cold Humboldt water with warm water. It causes hefty rainfalls in Peru. If El Niño was more common in the past it could explain the agriculture of the Nazca culture. And Maria Reiche could have been right with her agricultural calendar. A new theory. Over 35 years it will be falsified.

---

Comments

[robin]

IK WIL MEE!
Ahh ik ben jaloers..ik wil weer meereizen hahaha Maar je theorie klopte dus toch niet..ik geloofde het nog wel helemaal!