…en Perú - Travel Culture History News

Inca Wall

The Incas also arrived in the Nazca plains, albeit about 1000 years after the Nazca culture faded from existence. The people of these desert valleys still lived as they once did, maintaining the irrigation canals of their ancestors and producing textiles of similar quality with similar patterns. After being dominated by the Wari they were accustomed to the idea of foreign rule and submited to the Incas easily.

To administer the region the Incas built Paredones. Named in Spanish for its expertly fitted Inca walls, Paredones consisted of a number of adobe buildings, a stone-built palace and a corridor leading to stone steps that take you up to what would once have been a temple to the sun.

The surrounding hills are covered with the remains of lower quality homes, tombs, and tonnes of broken pottery. The entire site covers about 2km².

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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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The amazing shapes and lines drawn on the plains of Nasca have led to a growth in passenger numbers at the Maria Reiche aerodrome of some 110% in the past 10 years. This however has not gone hand in hand with proper renovation of the terminal’s aircraft.

A recent finding by the El Comercio newspaper has shown that 90% of the 38 planes operating at the aerodrome are between 35 and 40 years old. One aircraft, with registration OB-1202, is a staggering 52 years old! Thankfully the operator, Nasca Air Lines, formally Aero Ica, has recently been shut down.

In a similar situation is the company Nasca Connection, who operate three light aircraft manufactured in the 60’s and two in 1976. They have however bought three new planes of the Caravan brand made in 1998, 1999 and 2004 - this meaning that on average they have Nazca’s most modern fleet.

Carlos Palacín Fernández EIRL, another of the operators that recently changed its name to Travel Air, offers its services with six light aircraft built between 1961 and 1980, while Aero Paracas owns five aircraft built between 1960 and 1963. These are joined by Alas Peruanas who operate four planes with ages between 28 and 45 years, Expreso Moche has one plane from 1983, Aero Santos with one from 1966, Alas de América with one from 1973, Taxi Aereo Ejecutivo with two from 1963 and 1972, and finally Aero Palcazú with planes between 26 and 32 years old.

Without Peru’s Ministry of Transport (MTC) and Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) pushing for and legislating for renovation, little if anything is likely to be done.

A source at the aerodrome explains that on these old planes, navigation is carried out visually and by radio, whereas in other countries it is done by satellite. “In other countries this assistance from air traffic is through satellite equipment to minimize risks”.

The source goes on the explain that the 38 light aircraft that operate from the aerodrome have the exact same control panels, instruments, equipment, cabs, seats, doors, fuselage and wings from the year they were built. Nothing has been renewed.

Another issue is the limited passenger capacity. Of the 38 aircraft, 17 have space for three passengers, 12 for six passengers and only 4 for twelve passengers. This means, due to saturated skies over the lines, their is little capacity for further grown in tourism.

Accidents

In March of this year, five French citizens were killed after mechanical failures caused their plane to crash. The aeroplane was operated by Aeroica (Aero Ica) which has now had its operations shut down.

Last December a light aircraft belonging to Aerocondor carrying four French tourists had to make an emergency landing on the Panamerican highway due to a mechanical fault. Just days before, also due to a mechanical fault in their ageing fleet, 12 Japanese tourists and one North American were also involved in an emergency landing. The company’s licence to operate was revoked.

In March of 2007, another five French tourists almost lost their lives when their plane ran out of fuel mid-air. The operating company Aero-Palcazú had not given the group enough fuel to complete the trip. Luckily the pilot was able to land on the Panamerican highway without hitting cars.

Ten years ago, one of the worst accidents occurred. Two aircraft hit each other over Nazca killing ten Italian and German tourists.

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Maria Reiche

Born in Dresden, Germany, the young mathematics and geography student left her country with no real wish to come back - in 1932 a man named Adolf was rising to power but was not her kind of future leader. Looking for a way out, she applied for a job as a nanny for the children of a German consul in Cusco, Peru. She was hired, sailed to Peru and never returned.

She fell in love with the country, and the Inca capital. She also took an interest in Peru’s ancient cultures, as everyone who spends time in their country does, and enjoyed visiting the sites around Cusco such as the famed Machu Picchu.

She later moved to Lima where she took a teaching job, and worked as a translator for scientific papers. Hearing from an American scientist in Lima about some newly discovered lines and figures in the Nazcan desert, she was fascinated, and as soon as the opportunity arose she headed south. On seeing the figures from the air, she was so struck by them that she decided to dedicate herself to understanding them, what they meant and where they came from.

For the next 40 years of her life, Maria Reiche lived alone in a small house in the Ingenio valley, just to the side of the vast desert plains. She studied and published, studied and published, just able to fund what was long and tiring work. With the little money she made, this foreigner was able organise aerial photographs and campaign to the Peruvian Government to persuade them to protect their heritage. Eventually, the government agreed to restrict access to the plains so that people couldn’t walk and drive over the lines.

The tower Maria Reiche had built

She was able to hire couple of guards to protect the area, and spent time herself staring out over the plains from the visitor’s tower she had built looking for intruders.

Tirelessly, she spent day after day of her life under the hot sun cleaning rocks from lines, and working on her theories as to what they were for. She for one came to the conclusion that the lines were some kind of calendar, marking solstices and the passage of stars and constellations.

When her health deteriorated, and she was confined to a wheelchair, this remarkable woman still continued giving lectures on her beloved lines. She lived in a room in Nazca’s fancy Hotel Nazca Lines, which thanks to the military dictatorship of Velasco, was granted to her for the rest of her life without cost. She was given a host of honours including being declared an honorary citizen of Peru.

She grew very ill and died in 1998 at the age of 95, her work having given the town of Nazca the prosperity it has today from a booming tourist industry, as well as recognition and protection of the ancient mysterious lines that during her lifetime were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Despite not being able to definitively prove her theory, anyone and everyone who studies these lines and does prove something will owe her their success.

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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.

Related posts
Maria Reiche
The Nazca Culture
Could the Nazcans fly?
Nine fingered destiny

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One of the wells down into the aqueduct

The Aqueducts of Cantalloc, also known by the more hispanified Cantayo, are one of the Nazca civilisation’s greatest achievements - building them was a far more difficult task than creating the Nazca lines.

Cursed with a barren, dry and rocky desert in which to live, with only the narrowest of valleys with the narrowest of areas suitable for agriculture, developing hydraulic engineering was a necessity.

Between 30 and 50 underground channels were constructed about 1500 years ago, bringing water from rivers higher in the valley to the centre of their civilisation. Spanning kilometres, trenches were dug that were lined with stones and covered by wood from local trees before being reburied.

At Cantayo, 4km from the modern city of Nasca, we find about 17 open wells. These have paths that spiral down to the level of the running water that provide access to this precious resource, but possibly also access to clean or repair the structures in case of an earthquake.

This year-round irrigation system allowed the Nazca to widen the farmable area of the valleys in which they lived, growing their crops of cotton, corn, beans and potatoes, as well as a variety of fruit. The valleys around Nazca are as green today as they were when the canals were finished, and this is because these very same canals are still in use today.

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At least not this one anyway

Italian scientists announced to the world weeks ago that their “new sensing technology” had allowed them to discover a long lost pyramid, not too far the the ancient Nazca archaeological site of Cahuachi. Their “optimizing” of the images with their “special algorithms” seems to have failed them. There’s nothing there.

I decided to head out across the rolling sands of this Nazca valley, under the intense sun and strong gusts of dry throat-cracking winds to see for myself.

Unfortunately, I found a flat piece of land - a field in a farm - which has conveniently greener grasses where a water channel passes through. From satellite this looks remarkably like a pyramid, not the usual kind you find in Peru, but a pyramid.

No pyramid

Closer look

The flat valley floor has clearly changed little in centuries. The only way a pyramid could be buried at this remote location would be if some ancient peoples dug a very deep hole in the valley floor, placed a pyramid inside and covered it up again. Unlikely.

My hopes have been dashed.

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Nazca pyramid discovered

Updated here.

A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru’s Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome.

Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) discovered the pyramid by analysing images from the satellite Quickbird, which they used to penetrate the Peruvian soil.

The researchers investigated a test area along the river Nazca. Covered by plants and grass, it was about a mile away from Cahuachi’s archaeological site, which contains the remains of what is believed to be the world’s biggest mud city.

Via Quickbird, Masini and colleagues collected hi-resolution infra-red and multi spectral images. After the researchers optimized the images with special algorithms, the result was a detailed visualization of a pyramid extending over a 9,000-square-mile area.

The discovery doesn’t come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.

“We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi’s sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view,” Masini told Discovery News. “The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil.”

Cahuachi is the best-known site of the Nazca civilization, which flourished in Peru between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. and slid into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes.

Read the rest of this entry at Discovery.com »

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