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Descended from the older Paracas civilisation, the Nazca are of course most famous for their countless mysterious lines drawn in the rocky desert plains in which they lived. They were also great water engineers, creating a series of complex aqueducts.

When you think of the Nazca, you think of their mysterious geometric shapes and lines in the desert, which were seemingly important enough to dedicate such huge amounts of time and resources to create.

From their capital city of Cahuachi, archaeologists have gleamed far more information about this pre-Incan people. This city was of immense, memorising proportions. Most estimates put the terrain it covered at as much as 24km2, that’s, dare I mention it, bigger than Chan Chan, built centuries later. It stretches along the sandy slopes overlooking the fertile valley, in a line that is, by my estimate, about 12km. Here you’ll find dozens of pyramids, broken pottery scattered across the desert and textiles just beneath the surface.

What was found here told us that the Nazca were descendants of the older Paracas culture, continuing their production of some of the most complex and creative textile patterns in the Andean world, and continuing and improving upon their ceramic production techniques, creating new methods to produce colourful and more realistic decoration.

From their ancient burial ground of Chauchilla, we learn that far from being small, the average Nazcan was 1.7m or 5.57ft tall. They also sported long thing dreadlocks that reach the floor.

Other than the fascinating lines, or the huge ceremonial city of Cahuachi, the Nazca are also famous for their complex underground aqueducts, bringing water to the more arid parts of their world. Wells leading down into them are found at Cantalloc, near the much later Inca ruins of Paredones, eventual rulers of this land.

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It is a mystery as yet unsolved. How were the ancient Nazca able to draw such huge and complicated designs in the barren Nazca plains, drawings so large that they are only visible from the air? Could it be that this pre-Inca civilisation mastered some form of flight allowing them to both create and appreciate their work? Some think so.

Condor I

One of the first groups to propose that the Nazcans had mastered flight was the International Explorers Society in the 1970s. It seemed technically impossible to them that the famous shapes of the monkey, hummingbird and spider, among others, could ever have been drawn accurately without leaving the ground. There is no need to go as high as a light aeroplane, as Maria Reiche showed when she built a short 13m high tower that allows you to just make out 3 shapes. The Nazcans would only need to lift themselves off the ground by only a few times that.

Based on the exceptional quality of the textiles the Nazca people created, the group proposed that it could feasibly be used as the envelope of a simple hot-air balloon. Named Condor 1, their 26m high test balloon made with similar materials managed to make it to 183m before falling back to the ground with its two pilots then being whisked up again to 366m.

At the heart of this attempt were Jim Woodman, who had long proposed Nazcan flight, and Julian Nott a design engineer and balloonist. All involved were convinced that they had proven that it was at least a possibility that the ancient line builders could have flown.

Nott later said, “Would [the lines] have been made if no one could see them?  Would da Vinci have painted the Mona Lisa if he could not step back and admire the finished canvas?”

In 2002 Nott repeated this earlier success, creating a new balloon using only materials and techniques available in ancient times. He comments that the cotton fabric used in burials and found across the area are adequate for constructing a balloon.

Nott writes;

As you can easily understand, this project was intriguing to many balloonists and I was able to get wonderful people to participate. Peter Cuneo and Barbara Fricke came to Nazca and I was lucky enough to have Peter fly with me.  Having designed the balloon, I approached Best Aviation to build it. In Peru they organized the layout of the balloon with skill: it was not easy to manage 600 pounds of cotton fabric.

A lot of care went into the choice of fabric.  It had to be something the Nazca people could have woven. This was easy since their skills far exceeded what was needed for this balloon.  But it had to have adequate tensile and tear strength while being light.

When people see photographs of the balloon the general reaction is that it was very dangerous.  But in fact
Bert and I did a long series of tests to ensure the attachments were safe. Low porosity was of particular importance and this is a fascinating subject.  When we built the first prehistoric balloon it was so porous I feared it might not fly at all.  But inflating it over a fire and exposing it to suitable smoke for a long period, soot particles filled up the fabric.

Beyond the balloon and a fire the only other component of this starkly simple craft was the gondola.  The classic reed boat, known in Peru and Bolivia as the “Balsa“, has been made since ancient times.  The gondola was made by hand on one of the “Floating Islands” in Lake Titicaca. Twelve and a half thousand feet up in the Andes, the islands are a very unlikely workshop!

The flight proved to be another success, and those who believe the Nazca civilisation had the ability to fly cite this as evidence.

Others aren’t so sure. Katherine Reece is one such person.

Quoting from Jim Woodman’s book;

I know damned well someone flew at Nazca,” I kept insisting. “You simply can’t see anything from ground level. You can’t appreciate any of it from anywhere except from above. You can’t tell me the Nazca builders would have gone to the monumental efforts they did without ever being able to see it.

Reece responds;

With this modern, and incorrect, viewpoint in mind Woodman attempted to prove that the Nasca could have flown. To do so, he gathered information and constructed a hot-air smoke balloon using material available to the ancient Nasca people. While the lift for the balloon was provided by hot air the porous material was “sealed” by the smoke and soot from the fire. In this fashion a very short manned flight of approximately two minutes was successful.

She then derides him for coming to the conclusion that the Nazcans must have flown, and that this can be proven by archaeology. She complains that “Woodman did not reference his sources, provide detailed information, or images depicting his visual evidence that could be analyzed”. Woodman, for example, declared that a piece of pottery with an image that looks remarkably like a modern day hot air balloon was all but firm evidence that balloons existed. Reece, however, shows pretty clearly that it is just a bean.

Perhaps the most damning criticism;

When Woodman flew his balloon at Nasca he inflated the envelope by digging a pit, filling it with wood, and feeding the hot air and smoke into the balloon via a tunnel. Woodman claims that such burn pits with “charred rocks” are present however no evidence of any fires large enough to inflate a balloon have been found at Nasca. Markus Reindel, of the Organisation des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, has excavated what Woodman calls “burn pits” and discovered that they are in fact small shrines where offerings were made that have helped illuminate the purpose of the lines.

It seems unlikely that the Nazcans used balloons to design and admire their huge shapes, but Woodman and Notts have proven that they could have if their imaginations had stretched that far.

As for designing such huge shapes in the desert that no Nazcan other than the Nazcan gods could appreciate, I’d have to disagree with Notts and Woodman. Stranger and more devoted things have been done in the name of religion.

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Laying untouched for centuries, this isolated spot in the dry Nazcan desert was used as a place to bury and preserve the mummified dead of the Nazca culture. Since then, the countless hundreds of tombs found here have been pillaged and destroyed. What remains is at first a fascinating sight for visitors - bones, ceramics and cloth scattered across the sands, pieces of ancient fabric blowing around in the wind - but that fascination soon turns to despair as you realise the amount of precious historical information lost.

Ancient textiles in the sands

It almost looks like another planet, perhaps the moon. Crater after crater as far as you can see. These aren’t meteor impacts though, these were once the tombs of important members of the ancient Nasca society. It is they who inhabited this region of Ica from roughly 200B.C. to the coming of the Wari in the 700’s A.D.

These tombs, hundreds of them, were destroyed by tomb robbers in the past century. Fuelled by demand from wealthier parts of the world, the local poor - made so by the ways of their conquerors - ransacked the resting places of their ancestors destroying untold amounts of archaeological information. Pottery, metals, fine weaving and other objects were sold for thousands of dollars, while thousands of years of history were lost.

Despite the damage, a few complete bodies were found. So too were several tomb walls, giving us clues as to how burials took place - for example, bodies always faced the rising sun. One of the best preserved is in the site museum, still with skin and hair.

A Nazcan

Some examples of beautiful tapestries have been saved from the fate of being locked up in a private collection of a North American or European millionaire, and are on display to the public. Lesser cloth is found blowing around in the wind, or poking out of the sandy top-soil.

In the surviving tombs, some of the finds - bones, skulls and even intact mummies have been placed as they would have been. Visitors can walk around each of these and get a feel of how Chauchilla may once have been.

Perhaps the most interesting fact these mummies tell us is how the Nazcan people looked physically. Far from being the impoverished short Peruvians of the past five centuries, your typical well-fed and well nourished Nascan was a tall 1.7m or or 5′6″. Few Europeans were that tall in 500A.D.

Also fascinating is the Nazcan’s long dreaded hair, so long that if it were let down, it would trail along behind them as they walked. Many of the bodies found still sport this long hair, trend-setters for Caribbean peoples 1500 years later.

Visiting the site from Nasca is easy, it’s just 30km away, reachable by taxi for S./40. Make sure you ask for a ticket when you pay the small entrance fee, so you know the money is going to fund the preservation of the site.

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The Nazcan city of Cahuachi was a stunning and magnificent place. Stretching along the dusty hills above the Nazca River valley are an as-yet unknown number of pyramids and temples - a good number of those rolling hills are not at all natural features. Some estimates of the area the city covered are as much as 24km2 - bigger than even the famous Chimú city of Chan Chan.

Despite its size, no-one but the civilisation’s elite lived here on a permanent basis. Cahuachi was a religious and ceremonial city first, and the administrative centre of the Nasca’s world second. It is thought that huge gatherings took place here, where huge numbers of pilgrims from across the surrounding valley’s came to take part in rituals. Most of the ceramic pottery found here was high quality, beautifully decorated religious pottery - few simple domestic items have been found.

From the ceremonial city it is only a short distance across the valley and across the hills to the main desert plain on which you’ll find the civilisation’s famous geometric patterns, shapes and lines. Could the rituals carried out at Cahuachi and those carried out at the lines be part of the same event, part of the mass gatherings? It is so far unknown.

Grand Pyramid

The first thing that strikes visitors to this archaeological complex, being worked on by Italian Giuseppe Orefici, is the Gran Piramide, perhaps the best restored monument in the city where dozens more remain buried in the sands. Although it too still has a long way to go, it no longer looks like just a mound of sand.

The pyramid, and the other buildings stretching along 17km of the valley, are roughly between 1500 and 2200 years old. As well as pyramids there are ceremonial buildings, workshops, open spaces and places for pilgrims to stay.

At the foot of the Gran Piramide is the Templo del Escalonado, one of the oldest buildings and the most important during the earlier period of the city’s existence. This building was named as such because its walls were decorated with the top half of chakanas(Andean crosses) the look a little like stairs.

We know that music was important to the Nazca - we find images of musicians on many textiles and ceramics, but only from Cahuachi we find out why. It seems, based on archaeological finds of instruments such as flutes and drums at key ceremonial areas, that music was used during religious rituals and ceremonies.

Cahuachi existed for 8 centuries, from 400B.C. to 450A.D. when the city was abandoned. There was no rush in its abandonment though, huge amounts of resources were applied over time to demolish its outer walls and bury the many pyramids beneath the sands. The pyramids ceased to be artificial monuments and returned to nature as towering sandy hills. The city was no longer the capital of the Nasca, and became a holy place, even a burial place.

It is not known what caused the city’s abandonment, and what made the people move on to other newer urban centres, but it is thanks to their attachment to this place, and their care in burying and preserving their city, that one day we might, through our own application of huge amounts of resources, see it in its original form again, uncovered and restored - the biggest of the ancient urban centres of the southern Peruvian coast.

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Etched into the barren rocky desert plains of Nazca, in the region of Ica, is a mystery yet to be solved. Stretching for miles, and only visible from the air, are a series of lines, geometric shapes and figures that are 2000 years old. Created by the Nazca civilisation, their true purpose has yet to be determined.

How they were made

The deserts plains that span the distances between the narrow green valleys of southern Ica are a barren place strewn with rocky debris. Under the baking hot sun, no plant life can be found here.

Line formed by out-line stones

Line made by revealing sand below

There were two techniques the Nazcans used in this hostile environment to create the lines and shapes.

One was to simply pick up each rock and throw it to the side, revealing the lighter coloured sand beneath.

Repeating this process over tens of kilometres in a straight line would create a path through the rocks.

To help define the lines when needed, the rocks removed would be placed on the border of the created path, with the darker outline providing more contrast.

It can only be guessed at as to how the lines were built so straight… perhaps by using pegs and ropes… but some of the largest lines are more than 10km long. The complicated geometric shapes are precision perfect, the spirals found - both separately and on the tails of monkey images - must have be measured expertly.

No one is sure how such huge shapes, not of which can be seen from ground level, could be created with such precision.

What they were for

Theories abound as to what these lines were for, and the people of Nazca today respect each of them. Here are some:

The ancient people of Nazca lived in a brutal desert with little water. They saw this as a punishment from the gods, who if they prayed to sufficiently would reward them with the life-giving substance. So, as part of their organised religion, they created huge images in the desert, figures of animals mostly from wetter parts of the world - parrots, pelicans, monkeys and sea creatures. These huge images were only meant for the eyes of their gods and so could only be seen from the air. - Local stories

The lines point to places on the horizon where the sun, and other stars, rise and set. The lines form part of a huge celestial calendar. Some lines match up exactly with the rising and setting sun on certain days of the year, noticeably at key times such as the winter solstice. Animal figures may represent constellations of stars, and lines that pass through them indicated as yet unknown key dates or events. The lines were a sun calendar and a huge observatory for astronomical cycles. - Maria Reiche

The lines reveal sources of water. It can be no coincidence that many of the lines or geometric shapes end or begin at the edges of fertile valleys, essentially pointing at them. They might reveal underground sources of water or be futile requests to the gods to make the river water spread out into the plains in the direction of the lines. - David Johnson and others

It is now agreed that the lines were walked along in some kind of ritual. Religious pottery has been found along the lengths of many of the lines, and a great number are interconnected, forming routes that could be taken for different purposes. The entire central plain where the majority of the lines are found could have been one huge open-air temple. The truth is, where the lines are found there are a number of underground water sources, many of the lines do match with positions of celestial objects, they can only be seen from the air, they were walked on and the Nazca people’s religion almost certainly did involve pleading for more water. When the gods didn’t grant it to them, they even went and got it themselves.

For detailed reading, check out nazcamystery.com

Great people have been trying to work out exactly how much of each theory was true, such as Dr. Paul Kosok and of course Maria Reiche. You can read more about them, the lines and more in upcoming posts.

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