“Often, bits of ancient graffiti make past civilizations seem entirely human. But the most enduring works like the Egyptian Pyramids, the Great Wall and the Nazca Lines seem to imply an almost unimaginable grandiosity.” – Old Sean
Warning: This article has images some readers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion advised.
Dry Plateau
In the southern portion of Peru, exists a gargantuan rain shadow which dries the land for endless miles and renders the horizon hazy with loose dust and eternal wind. There are heaping brown mountains that shift between deep stone and light, bleached dirt lying in every direction. Vegetation (gnarled, watertight and a dusty olive color) is scarce, mostly clustering around a few shallow streams that hold water from mountain runoff only two months of the year. Clouds abhor the sky and roads of stone gravel grow warped with time.
The city itself is made of low brick buildings, each ducking in another’s shadow. Dogs slouch in the shade, only jogging around when night encroaches and the people here are bronzed and glow softly in an unrelenting sun.
I am, of course, speaking of Nazca. After getting used to the rough coastal sands near Ica, I took another bus, this time arriving at a large city in the desert, descended from one of the hardiest and most mysterious people known to archeology.
Pre-dating the Inca, thriving from nearly the beginning of Common Era to 600 C.E, the Nasca people had a foothold in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth.
An Introduction of the Lines
The Nasca people held a sophisticated society in one of the driest places on the planet, building wonders of immense size, many of which were reclaimed by the desert. The most famous of these remnants, of course, are the Nazca Lines; a series of drawing, geometrics, charts and mysteries etched into a high plateau on the desert.
The Lines are large, beyond easy visualization, taking up vast kilometers of empty space in carefully arranged patterns. They’re nearly impossible to see from ground level. Indeed, the only way to experience the Lines is by taking a small prop plane and scanning the desert from above.
The morning I arrived in Nazca, I talked to an acquaintance who put me in touch with a hostel who arranged a flight over the lines for a mere $50 USD. Most of the online tours I could find offered a thirty minute flight over Nazca for around $87 USD, so this was a very welcome discovery.
Insights on the Nasca People
I made my way to the airport, grateful for the shelter. Nazca isn’t exactly hot: Indeed, the wind and cold ocean currents striking the coast chill the air considerably. But the sun is exceptionally harsh and I went through great lengths to avoid getting an early sunburn during this portion of my trip.
While waiting in the small airport lobby, I watched a video of archeologists unearthing Nazca bones in the desert in the style of those old, actor-oriented History Channel documentaries. The narrator discussed the culture clues and the show switched between reenactments and archeologists working.
The original Nasca people dealt with harsh droughts regularly along with an already existing dry climate. The show mentioned their cultures use of blood sacrifices (skulls with a hole punched through to hold a rope) which were likely a form of divine plea for water. (Many of the sacrificial victims were young women between 12 and 16).
The Nasca people buried their dead in extremely formal mummification processes, sitting them upright in holes in the desert in the fetal position, their bodies propped up with canvases and rope.
This style of burial ties the Nasca people to the early civilizations found in Paracas, where people were buried in a similar manner. What happened next in the documentary, I never found out, for it was my turn to fly.
Flying the Lines
Double masked with a set of sound-blocking headphones, I was loaded onto a tiny blue propeller aircraft and quickly launched into the sky. The land around Nazca is a vivid mess of dried rivers and tributaries, the water scaring deep and colorful paths into arroyos leading slightly downward. The tumble of mountains that rose above the plateau were a deep, rusty brown while the lower grounds were pale, endless dirt specked with loose, sitting stones. In the far distance, Cerro Blanco, the largest sand dune in South America, rose like a ghost, shadowing mountains indistinctly and rising well above the tallest peak.
The plane ride was a rocking sort, with the wings tilting frequently and bobbing happily whenever we struck an updraft of gust. The man to my right didn’t seem to be feeling well during the ride, but he held it together. Even in the worst case, there are discreet little vomit bags kept in the front of everyone’s seat. Finally, the pilot tilted the plane so we could see down, and we saw our first geoglyph.
Nazca has several kinds of lines tracing the desert grounds. The first and most recent are modern roads and foot trails.
The second and most artistically difficult to follow are places where water once made a futile stand and scarred the land.
The third, and by far the most mysterious and confusing, are enormous straight, geometric lines splitting off in every direction imaginable. But the final sort of images are the ones that made Nazca famous: The animals, plants and symbols (often known as biomorphs). These are roughly 2,000 years old and remain intact thanks to the dry, arid and isolated climate of the plateau.
Souring the Geoglyphs
The biomorphs are extremely interesting, and they correlate to pottery images found in Nasca tombs. These are enormous figures, carefully drawn with mathematical precision throughout the land.
A spear-beaked hummingbird is splayed over the ground in one area. In another, an enormous monkey with a thin frame and endless, spiraling tail crawls elsewhere. A (relatively) small dinosaur or dragon is plastered to the side of a cliff face. A perfectly symmetrical spider takes up another portion of the desert. A strange humanoid, dubbed “the astronaut” rests on another cliff. A truly gigantic condor scraped an entire portion of the desert and a squat tree takes up another area. The eldest image is a whale, faintly swimming through desert sands below.
The list goes on, with images of a dog, a lizard, a pelican and many spirals all take up a large portion of the desert. The drawings are sliced and attached to hundreds of mysterious straight lines of an unknown function elsewhere in the desert. The lines are actually somewhat hard to see, since they’re just slightly lighter than the ground around them. In photographs, it’s generally necessary to increase the contrast dramatically to make the images stand out.
Finally, after straining my eyes across that drawn world, the plane janked to the side and we returned to the airport.
Unknowns of the Lines
It’s no mystery that the Nazca Lines are a mystery in function. Archeologists Xesspe and Mathematician Reiche both strongly argued that the lines were astronomical calendars, used for correlating movements in the heavens.
Other theories suggest the lines were used to mark out special ritual zones, used to plead the gods above for water. Still others simply suggest they were plain worship, a method for showing deities the thoughts of their believers.
Some folks currently think the lines were a spiritual maze made manifest, a sort of trial for young men and women of the clans. There is also the idea that the lines functioned as a de-facto map to water sources underground throughout the desert.
More outlandish theories include the ideas that the lines were actually running tracks used as sport venues in the scorching land, or athletic runways where gods could watch mortals compete. And of course, alien theories tend to hit the ground like meteorites in this part of the world, the high water mark for the extraterrestrial theories arriving in the 1960’s.
Overall, there’s a fierce lack of consensus.
Desert Raiders
Though my original plan was to continue on from Nazca, I decided to stay an extra night and a day. The night, because I was tired and my next leg of the journey would require 12 hours of driving. A day because Nazca to Cusco doesn’t offer any day buses. Overnight busses from 8 PM onward are the only ones available.
Undaunted, I settled into my hostel and spent some time walking around the city with an extremely friendly street dog. I next found a man who would be willing to drive me around as a de-facto tour guide into the Nazca desert.
Though the Lines are, by orders of magnitude, the most famous things in Nazca, the city offers a lot of other very unique attractions. The following morning, I drove off into the desert, kicking up a cloud of lonely dust as we went to “the craters.”
The craters aren’t actually a place. They’re actually the entire desert, mostly close to the road. The land here is naturally flat or hilly, but pockets of holes filled in by wind and sand are everywhere.
These holes are actually poor-men tombs in the Nasca culture; ancient burial sites recently excavated by grave robbers earning a living in the area. The Peruvian government doesn’t do much to dissuade them and many archeology protection projects around Nazca have lost funding in the past few decades.
Robbing Graves
However, the tombs are extremely interesting. I got to speak to a self-described retired grave robber after my visit to the area. The robbers use a special metal stake with a T shape on the top and use it to plunge into the ground. Since the Nasca made their tombs as deep, cylindric holes with a roof of dried wood, the stake would sometimes hit a wooden sound and then open up the air pocket underneath.
Tombs in Nazca are terribly common, but also extraordinarily dangerous. The arid climate means a very slow rate of decay and the tombs are effectively air-sealed, meaning a lot of chemicals are bouncing around down there. Once a grave robber finds a tomb, the next part is extremely tricky. The must extract the grave without damaging the interior and avoid getting a blast of whatever lurks inside. A-many tomb robbers in Nazca have died due to ammonia poisonings or inhaling some sort of long dormant illness from a millennia ago.
However, if the raider is successful, they’ll likely find a poor-man’s tomb underneath. (Rich tombs were located in temple areas). Nasca people were buried sitting upright in the fetal position, wrapped in fine fabrics and thin strands of extremely tough rope.
Most interestingly, their hair is usually attatched and intact, the climate preserving it for nigh millennia. This part is important because the Nasca people were apparently quite vain about their hair. They grew it extremely long and ornate.
One theory regarding the famed “Astronaut” biomorph glyph in the Nazca desert is the pouch on the humanoids back actually represents the long locks of your average Nasca citizen. It’s very strange seeing a bleached skull with hair flopped around it in the stark light of day.
These natural mummies are wildly interesting and full ones can be found in Chauchilla Cemetery in the south, part of Nazca’s enormous Necropolis. The cemetery was closed (due to COVID currently), but my guide managed to get me in later in the day.
The remains in the desert, however, are usually broken by wind and elements after being removed. Bits of bones, bleached skills, rapidly fraying ropes, heaps of ancient canvas and thin shards of potter often dot the ground.
The tomb raiders are primarily after actual jugs and painted pots which many tourists have paid well for in the past. A single tomb with five stone jars that have been painted are worth upwards of $1,200 USD. A few decades ago, it would have fetched over $3,000 dollars.
The Nazca Pyramids
My tour of the endless craters where tomb raiders had made their dubious living finished, my guide and I spent some time near a den of burrowing owls before making it the rest of the way to Cahuachi Pyramids. The pyramids are a very cool feature of the Nasca culture, sort of a high-priest Vatican city of the desert.
Low mud and brick walls make a maze gradually twisting towards a summit. The pyramids were originally made with a non-uniform series of clay bricks, packed together in a slight, soft-edged triangle shape and then layered with flat mud. Cahuachi Pyramid was considered a vital religious center and hosted shamans, doctors (odd translation, doctors might be used as “holy or blessed witch doctor) and religious figures in the culture.
The current pyramid, which is visable to tourists, was excavated and restored by an Italian team, though the process ended before the COVID pandemic. Interestingly, the superstructure is only about 10% uncovered, according to my guide. The majority of the city is still claimed by the vast desert.
I took my photos like a good little tourist and walked down to the dry river area where the first few plants I saw were still hanging onto leaves. My guide showed me a stone-wood tree by picking up a small boulder and slamming it against the trunk to no effect.
Stone wood trees were apparently a major building component for the Nasca, and they used the great twisting trunks as a viable construction material in an otherwise scarce desert.
Ancient Functions
My guide next showed me some of the more modern features of Nazca. I was brought to a huge crater in the earth, lined endlessly with little round stones. At the base of the crater, there was a family cooling their feet in cool, perfectly clear water. Inside the shallow water, pools of small fish browsed their geometric pool, nibbling happily at feet and fingers placed into the water.
This was one of the famed Aqueducts of the Nasca people. Built in response to their precarious drought conditions, the Nasca create special wells that could be walked into which tapped into latent, underground water sources.
The water sources remained clear and clean to this day and are a viable source of liquid for farmers in the area to continue working. If a person has built something which ensures the livelihood and survival of their dependents for nearly two millennia, they’ve probably done something worthy.
My guide took me to another Aqueduct later on; the more famous Acueductos de Cantalloc which serves the same function but with an entrancing spiral pattern worked into the stone walls while people descend.
A third aquifer can be found behind Museo Arqueológico Antonini, which is crammed full of additional Nasca civilization relics. All of these structures are unique designs and shapes, but all are functioning in modern times, bringing a desert population clean, clear water.
Cacti and Owl Grove
Finally, my tour was complete. My guide stopped as we drove past vast fields of prickly-pear cacti, which are grown as an interesting crop. The cacti (though edible and especially popular in Mexico) are not actually used for food.
Rather, they’re used to spawn a special kind of scale insect reside called grana cochinilla. These white, dusty spores don’t appear impressive, but when crushed, they bleed a vivid, staining red, looking almost exactly like too-thick blood.
Grana cochinilla is used in the dye and cosmetic industry to great effect, and the prickly-pear-cactus is their home. We saw another pair of burrowing owls as we drove and my guide lamented that farmers often killed them by placing large stones over their burrows, believing the beautiful birds to be bad luck.
It would be fair to say humans are sapient, but it’s an uphill argument trying to convince other humans we’re intelligent.
Town Wind Down
I had my driver drop me off at Mamashana Café, a great little restaurant located in the downtown portion of Nazca for a late lunch. The whole street (Av. Bolognesi) is sort of the spot for foreigners to shop, eat and hang out. I finished my meal, walked through Nazca’s somewhat nice Plaza de Armas de Nazca and went back to my hostel, which agreed to let me keep my room until my bus departed for a mere 10 soles.
The only thing I didn’t get to do in Nazca was visit the enormous sand dune, Cerro Blanco, but I had enough time with sand dunes in Huacachina to last me this week at the very least.
Overall, Nazca is hot, dry, dusty, harsh, sun-riddled and the birthplace to more historical conspiracy theories than nearly anywhere else I’ve visited. The tours are painfully expensive, so a local guide is truly the best way to explore.
Speaking of exploring, it’s time for me to pack. I’ll be eating my breakfast on a bus heading to Cusco, so it’d be wise for me to stock up.
Until then,
Best regards and excellent trails,
Old Sean
Written November 18th 2021
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