The Nazca Lines, connection to NASA putting Ad's on MARS???

The Nazca Lines are an engima. No one has proof who built them or why. Since their discovery, the Nazca Lines have inspired fantastic explanations from ancient gods, a landing strip for returning aliens, a celestial calendar created by the ancient Nazca civilization -- putting the creation of the lines between 200 BC and 600 AD, used for rituals probably related to astronomy, to confirm the ayllus or clans who made up the population and to determine through ritual their economic functions held up by reciprocity and redistribution, or a map of underground water supplies.

There are also huge geoglyphs in Egypt, Malta, United States (Mississippi and California), Chile, Bolivia and in other countries. But the Nazca geoglyphs, because of their numbers, characteristics, dimensions and cultural continuity, as they were made and remade through out the whole prehispanic period, form the most impressive, as well as enigmatic, archeological group.

Nazca People - Cahuachi

On the pampa, south of the Nazca Lines, archaeologists have now uncovered the lost city of the line-builders, Cahuachi. It was built nearly two thousand years ago and was mysteriously abandoned 500 years later. New discoveries at Cahuachi are at last beginning to give us insight into the Nazca people and to unravel the mystery of the Nasca Lines.

In general, Nazca culture is considered to consist of three stages; Early, Middle, and Late stages, and also the Classic Nazca (approximately A.D. 250-750). One of the most famous and distinctive features of the Nazca culture is the polychrome pottery which has attracted attention because of its technological refinement and the exciting symbolism of its motifs. This pottery culture spreads in the area of the valleys of Chincha, Pisco, Ica, Nazca and Acari.

In the Early stage, these wares did not have much color, but Middle and Late Nazca polychromes are buff or red and are painted in three to eight colors. The most popular choices of color were red, black, white, brown, yellow, gray and violet with an outline in black. Bowls and beakers were common forms, but double-spout and head-and-spout jars are also found. Birds, fish or fruits were commonly drawn on the pottery, and Nazca's religious or mythological features were also used in its design.

Nazca Figurine depicting Solar Eclipse and the Eye of Creation.

Cahuachi was a major ceremonial center of the Nazca culture and overlooked some of the Nazca lines from 1 CE to about 500 CE. Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Orefici has been excavating the site for the past few decades, bringing a team down every year. The site contains over 40 mounds topped with adobe structures.

The permanent population was quite small, but it was apparently a pilgrimage center that grew greatly in population for major ceremonial events. These events probably involved the Nazca lines and the giant sand dune of Nazca. Support for the pilgrimage theory comes from archaeological evidence of sparse population at Cahuachi and from the Nazca lines themselves which show creatures such as killer whales and monkeys which were not present in the Nazca region. Trade or travel may explain the images. Due to the dry climate the finds are quite rich and include even such ephemeral material as clothing. Looting is the greatest problem facing the site today.

Weaving

Burial Sites

Most of the burial sites surrounding Cahuachi were not known until recently and so present a very tempting target for archaeologists. Their ancient technique of weaving, that the Nazca people developed, has given an insight into how the lines may have been made, and what they might have been used for more than 1,500 years ago.

Mummies

Most exciting is the discovery of human remains.

Stunningly preserved in the dry soil of the Peruvian desert are the mummified bodies of the Nazcan people themselves.

   

Nazca Skulls with Enlarged cranium

Incan Skulls

Originally believed to have been a military stronghold, Cahuachi is now reckoned to be a place of ritual and ceremony, and Orefici's stunning new evidence confirms this idea. Cahuachi is now revealed to have been abandoned after a series of natural disasters destroyed the city. But before they left it, the Nazcan people covered the city in the arid pampa sand where, until recently, it has remained a barely visible mound in the desert.

 

It is difficult to keep the Nazca Lines free from outside intervention. As with all ancient ruins, such as Machu Piccu, weather by wind and rain, and human tampering will take their toll on these ancient Lines.

In recent years the Nazca Lines have suffered gradual destruction, as tomb raiders seeking pre-Inca artifacts scar the terrain with hundreds of burrows, garbage, among other waste material. A boom in copper and gold mining - including a mine built in 1997 a few feet from a 2,000-year-old, two-mile-long trapezoid -- is defacing parts of the Nazca Lines with tracks from truck traffic.

Over the past decade, advertisers and political campaigns have carved huge messages in the rock and sand between the ancient designs in this region 250 miles south of Lima.

In 1998, floods and mudslides from the El Nino weather pattern seriously eroded several figures.

As electricity reaches the growing local population, utility companies are running power cables over and around the site.

The damage to the Lines underscores Peru's desperate struggle to preserve its national patrimony. Archaeologists say they are watching helplessly as the quest for scholarship and conservation in a country viewed as the cradle of New World civilization is losing out to commercial interests, bleak poverty and the growing popularity of heritage sites as tourist attractions.

Japanese researchers find new giant picture on Peru's Nazca Plateau

MSN - April 21, 2006

A new giant picture on the Nazca Plateau in Peru, which is famous for giant patterns that can be seen from the air, has been discovered by a team of Japanese researchers.

The image is 65 meters long, and appears to be an animal with horns. It is thought to have been drawn as a symbol of hopes for good crops, but there are no similar patterns elsewhere, and the type of the animal remains unclear.

The discovery marks the first time since the 1980s that a picture other than a geometrical pattern has been found on the Nazca Plateau.The picture was found by a team of researchers including Masato Sakai, an associate professor at Yamagata University, after they analyzed images from a U.S. commercial satellite.

They confirmed it was a previously undiscovered picture in a local survey in March this year. It is located south of the Nazca Plateau, and apparently went undiscovered since few tourist planes pass over the area.

Two parts of the picture, that appear to be horns, bear close resemblance to those that appear on earthenware dating from 100 B.C. to A.D. 600, during the time when the Nazca kingdom flourished, and it is thought that they relate to fertility rites.

The research team will use images from the advanced land-observing satellite "Daichi," which was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in January this year, to create a distribution map of images on the earth that can be seen from the air. There is evidence that vehicles had driven in the area, and part of the picture is destroyed. "We want to identify all the images, and work to preserve earth pictures that are gradually being destroyed," Sakai said.

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