The Nazca Lines: A Message Written in the Desert — But for Whom?
Fly over the Nazca Pampa in southern Peru and the barren desert floor suddenly becomes a gallery. A hummingbird with a wingspan of nearly a hundred meters. A monkey with a spiraling tail. A spider, a condor, a whale — and dead-straight lines that run for kilometers across the plateau as if drawn with a ruler. Hundreds of these figures, known as geoglyphs, were scratched into the earth between roughly 500 BC and 500 AD, most of them by the Nasca culture that flourished here long before the Inca.
How they were made is no mystery at all. The desert surface is covered with dark, iron-oxide-coated stones; sweep them aside and the pale ground beneath shows through. With simple tools, wooden stakes and cords, small teams could lay out even the largest figures. Researchers have reproduced the technique in modern experiments. And because this is one of the driest, most windless places on Earth, the shallow furrows have survived for two millennia almost untouched.
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