"
Spanning 500
square kilometres of the arid Peruvian desert, or pampa as it is
called, the huge trapezoids, animal figures and long straight lines etched in
the earth have led to some fanciful theories about their purpose. Runways for
alien spaceships, the site..."
Spanning 500
square kilometres of the arid Peruvian desert, or pampa as it is
called, the huge trapezoids, animal figures and long straight lines etched in
the earth have led to some fanciful theories about their purpose. Runways for
alien spaceships, the site of gigantic pre-Columbian Olympic Games and even
ancient minimalist art, the Nazca lines have left a tantalizing legacy that
has us wanting to ponder their usage. Yet they haven't offered quite enough
information to help us solve that mystery.
Paul Kosok, an American geographer, was one of the first
people to study the lines. He proposed that the straight lines represented
'the largest astronomy book in the world', believing they were intended to
point to astronomical events at the horizon. He came to the conclusion after
witnessing the sun setting almost exactly over the end of one of the long
single lines - on June 22, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the
shortest day of the year. The theory was further explored by Maria Reiche, a
German mathematician, who spent more than half of her life measuring and
mapping the lines. She believed that the lines predict the positions of the
Sun, Moon, planets and stars and that they were used to determine the correct
time of year for planting seeds, the annual appearance of water in the rivers,
and the right times to harvest the crops.
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