Postcard from Nazca Lines

We have now returned to Lima  from where we have gone by coach to the Nazca Lines, which we now fly over.

The Nazca Lines are to the south of Ica beside the Pan-American Highway where, on the plains of San Jose, lies a collection of mysterious geoglyphs and straight lines that were etched into the desert in about 600 AD.

The Nazca Lines are furrows about 20 centimetres deep, forming shapes such as a humming bird,  a monkey and a fish, and are about 500 metres long.  In 1901 Max Uhle first studied them, followed by Toribio Mejia Xesspe in 1926, but it was Paul Kosok who brought them to the attention of the world in 1939.

Here's the candelabrum:

This is supposedly the monkey:

And this is the hummingbird:

 Because they can only be seen properly from the air, due to their size, the theory goes that they were created either by humans or aliens to provide landing guidance for spaceships.  It the goes on to say that after the aliens departed the humans began to build up a religion around them aimed at bringing the aliens back to earth.
These are supposed to be trees:

Serra Head, in Science 2.0, states the following:

Well known Skeptic, Joe Nickell, was able to reconstruct the geoglyphs in a remarkably short time using basic, simply reproduced, and most certainly available instruments for the time.

Nickell also makes a point about the whole “They can ONLY be seen from the SKY” statement:

“It is frequently asserted that the Nazca drawings are recognizable only from the air. That is not quite true, certainly not of the smaller figures, such as the effigy of a fish, which is only 80 feet long (Reiche 1976). Neither is it true of some drawings — attributed to the Nazcas’ predecessors — that are found on hill slopes (McIntyre 1975; Isbell 1978, 1980). Here, seemingly, is a clue to how the Nazcas could have been confident of the accuracy of their method of enlargement. Once a technique was found to be successful for producing large drawings on slopes, where they could actually be viewed from the ground, the same technique could be expected to consistently yield good results — wherever figures were drawn and whatever their size.” [2]

This point was also made by The Nazca-Palpa Project in 2007 [3], where they not only dated the geoglyphs and gave sequence order to the deposition, they remarked that the smaller glyphs could be seen from a short distance, like from a slope [3].

I would hope at this point that I’ve provided enough evidence to remove aliens from the picture. I can show that the geoglyphs were most probably a cultural tool used to create a sense of community and possibly served ritual purposes dating from about 400 BC till sometime after 600 AD [3]. I have shown that they could have been created using nothing more than a sketch, knotted rope, and T-square [2], all of which was available in that time period. There is also the well known C-14 dates of the pottery sherds and burials associated with the lines, which help us put the lines into context [2,3]. There is no need to add aliens to the mix, they are unnecessary. They create a complication that is not needed since everything has a simple, human explanation. 

It really is very interesting and the Nazca Lines are a real must to see.  In my next post we're going on to the Ballestas Islands.  Here, finally, is an image of all the hieroglyphs at Nazca: