Friday, September 13, 2024

Hello up there

One of the wildest manmade sights on Earth has to be the Nazca Lines (not to be confused with the NASCAR lines, which are better understood.) These are figures etched into the earth in Peru, in the Pampa Colorada. They depict a spider, a killer whale, a monkey, and other animals. These lines are estimated at about 2,000 years old, some perhaps older. And they can only be seen whole from the air. Who was expected to see them at the time? Makes you think.

It's worth thinking about them in the context of the average people of the Nazca tribe. The would see that something had been etched into the ground. They couldn't see what it looked like exactly. Nonetheless it was part of where they lived. A shared connection to...something.

2 comments:

susan said...

I'd agree that out of many unexplained mysteries in
the world the Nazca Lines rate near the top, especially
considering they're right out there in the open. There
are a number of hypotheses about when the Nazca
Lines were made and who actually made them -
Von Daniken believed they were meant as landing areas
visible only to the gods while a modern archeologist
believes that the Nazca figures are markers for
subterranean water with the geoglyphs forming a
huge map of underground water resources.

The most thought-provoking and mysterious of the
animal figures is the spider. Entomologists have
discovered that the spider design is of a genus
belonging to one of the world's rarest spiders.
It lives only in the most inaccessible places in the
Amazon forest (932 miles away).

You might be interested in reading some of this article
by Brien Foerster on Graham Hancock's website.

https://grahamhancock.com/foersterb9/

Ben said...

It is interesting that the spider design corresponds to such a rare spider. There are a few possible explanations, I suppose. One is that the spider underwent a migration or consolidation, that it used to live in places where it doesn't live now, although it would be weird for there to be no physical traces. Or perhaps the Nazcas had more contact than is known with deep Amazon tribes. That would take a lot of accounting as well. So if it's one of those or something else, I don't know.

That was a very good, and very comprehensive article by Brien Foerster. It does mention the Von Daniken theory like you do. The idea of them mapping out underground water sources is intriguing. It's about the most complex and labor intensive way that you could do so, but ritual can take some unusual forms. Then there was the experiment to see if they had access to hot air balloons from which they could design these great drawings while observing from above. Apparently they didn't, but it was worth a shot. As Foerster says, no one explanation has adequately covered them, so the truth is probably a mix of a bunch of theories.