If you've ever heard of the Nazca lines, you have this woman to
thank for preserving them for posterity. And if you've ever doubted that
one person can make a difference, think again…
HELP WANTED
In
1932, a 20-year-old German woman named Maria Reiche answered a
newspaper ad and landed a job in Peru, tutoring the sons of the German
consul. After that, she bounced from job to job and eventually found
work translating documents for an archaeologist named Julio Tello.
One
day she happened to overhear a conversation between Tello and another
archaeologist, Toribio Mejia. Mejia described some mysterious lines he'd
seen in a patch of desert about 250 miles south of the capital of Lima,
near the small town of Nazca. He tried to interest Tello in the lines,
but Tello dismissed them as unimportant. Reiche wasn't so sure. She
decided to go to Nazca and have a look for herself.
MYSTERIOUS LINES
Gazing
across the desert floor, Reiche was amazed at what she saw: More than
1,000 lines crisscrossing 200 square miles of desert, some as narrow as
footpaths, others more than 15 feet wide. Many ran almost perfectly
straight for miles across the desert, deviating as little as four yards
in a mile.
The
lines were made by the early Nazca people, etched into the desert floor
between 200 BC and 700 AD. They had created the lines by removing the
darkened surface fragments (known as "desert varnish') to reveal the
much lighter stone underneath.
But why?
WAITING FOR SUNDOWN
An
American archaeologist and historian named Paul Kosok had a theory. At
first he thought the lines might be irrigation ditches, but they weren't
large enough or deep enough to transport water. Then he started to
wonder if they might have some astronomical significance. So, on June
21, 1941, the southern hemisphere's winter solstice, he went out to the
desert and waited for the sun to set.
Sure enough, when the sun
set, it did so at a point on the horizon that was intersected by one of
the Nazca lines. The line seemed to serve as an astronomical marker,
telling the Nazca people that the first day of winter had arrived.
BIG BIRD
Kosok
had also observed that while most of the Nazca lines were straight,
some were curvy. But it wasn't until he plotted one on a piece of paper,
then looked down to see that he had drawn the outline of a giant bird,
that he realized some of the lines were
drawings. The drawings were so large that they could not be made out by anyone looking at them from the ground.
With
the discovery of the solstice line and the giant bird, Kosok became
convinced that the Nazca lines were an enormous astronomical calendar,
or, as he put it, "the world's largest astronomy book," with each lines
carefully laid out to correspond to something in the heavens above.
Maybe, he speculated, the giant bird represented a constellation in the
night sky. He offered Reiche a job helping him survey the lines so he
could prove his theory.
LIFELONG PASSION
She
took the job, and after a few months of tramping across the desert each
day with little more than a canteen of water and a pencil and paper to
record her observations, she found what she was looking for: a line that
intersected with the sun on the southern hemisphere's summer solstice,
December 21. That was all it took- Reiche was convinced that Kosok's
theory was correct. And she would spend the rest of her life trying to
prove it.
At
first Reiche could only afford to visit the Nazca lines only
occasionally, and because she was German she was not allowed to work at
the site at all during World War II. By 1946, however, she was living in
Peru year-round and spending nearly all her waking hours in the desert
trying to unlock the secret of the lines. When Kosok left Peru in 1948,
she continued without him.
Studying the lines wasn't as simple
as it sounds. In those days, many of them were obscured by dirt, sand,
and centuries of new desert varnish that it was barely possible to find
them. That they were distinguishable at all was thanks only to the fact
that they were etched a few inches into the desert floor.
CLEAN SWEEP
Reiche
decided to "clean" the lines so that they could be more easily seen.
First she tried using a rake. When that didn't work, she switched to a
broom. It's estimated that over the next 50 years, she swept out as many
as 1,000 of the lines by herself, carefully mapping the location of
each one as she went along, and returning to the same lines at different
times of day and in all lights to be certain that she was following
their true courses.
In the process Reiche discovered -and
uncovered- as many as 30 drawings similar to the giant bird that Kosok
had found, including numerous birds, two lizards, four fish, a monkey, a
whale, a pair of human hands, and a man with an owl-like head. The
scope of her work is astonishing: When you look at an aerial photograph
of the Nazca lines -any photograph of any of the lines or ground
drawings- there's a good chance that Reiche swept those lines herself.
Mile after mile after mile of them, using only one tool- an ordinary
household broom.
LOST IN SPACE
Just as
Reiche was almost single-handedly responsible for restoring the Nazca
lines, she was also the first to bring them to public attention. Her
1949 book
Mystery on the Desert helped to generate worldwide interest in the lines.
But what really put them on the map was a 1968 book written by a Swiss hotelier named Erich Von Daniken. His book
Chariots of the Gods
proposed that some of the lines were landing strips for alien
spacecraft. According to Von Daniken's theory, aliens created the human
race by breeding with primates, then returned to outer space. The early
humans then etched the drawings into the desert floor, hoping to attract
the aliens back to earth.
JOIN THE CROW
Chariots of the Gods
was an international bestseller, and its success prompted other people
to write books of their own with more theories about the origin of the
lines. One speculated the lines were ancient jogging tracks; another
claimed they were launch sites for Nazcan hot-air balloonists. These
books turned the Nazca lines into a New Age pop culture phenomenon,
helping to attract tens of thousands of tourists to the site each year.
As
a result, the Nazca lines began to suffer from overexposure- more and
more tourists went into the desert on foot, on dirt bikes, and in dune
biggies, doing untold damage to the lines in the process.
Reiche
did what she could to protect them. For years she lived in a small
house out in the desert so that she could watch over the lines herself,
and she used the profits from her writing and lecturing to pay security
guards to patrol the desert. By the end of her life she was crippled by
Parkinson's disease, but she continued to study the lines and was known
to chase intruders away in her wheelchair. By the time of her death in
1998 at the age of 95, she was nearly deaf and almost completely blind.
Not that it really mattered to her- "I can see every line," she said,
"every drawing, in my mind."
FINAL IRONY
Though
Reiche devoted most of her life to proving the Nazca lines are a giant
astronomical calendar, that theory has been largely discarded.
Researchers now believe that while a few of the lines may indeed point
to astronomical phenomena such as the summer and winter solstices (with
more than 1,000 lines running across the desert floor in all directions,
even
that may be a coincidence), most of the lines are
processional footpaths linking various sacred sites in the desert. The
ground drawings, they believe, are artwork the Nazcans made for their
gods.
Kosok
had also observed that while most of the Nazca lines were straight,
some were curvy. But it wasn't until he plotted one on a piece of paper,
then looked down to see that he had drawn the outline of a giant bird,
that he realized some of the lines were drawings. The drawings were so large that they could not be made out by anyone looking at them from the ground.
She
took the job, and after a few months of tramping across the desert each
day with little more than a canteen of water and a pencil and paper to
record her observations, she found what she was looking for: a line that
intersected with the sun on the southern hemisphere's summer solstice,
December 21. That was all it took- Reiche was convinced that Kosok's
theory was correct. And she would spend the rest of her life trying to
prove it.
Chariots of the Gods
was an international bestseller, and its success prompted other people
to write books of their own with more theories about the origin of the
lines. One speculated the lines were ancient jogging tracks; another
claimed they were launch sites for Nazcan hot-air balloonists. These
books turned the Nazca lines into a New Age pop culture phenomenon,
helping to attract tens of thousands of tourists to the site each year.
