Slashdot Mirror
Reading Between the Lines of Nazca
Kathy Miles writes "About 2000 years ago, the people in an area of Peru etched drawings in the ground so large that they cannot be seen easily except from high above the ground. Many explanations, some far into the realm of science fiction, have been offered for the lines but
now two archeologists think they know why the drawings were made. They believe that the area was then desert and that the drawings were all about water."
I watched a show once that demonstrated how the lines could have been made. They made a Neo-Nazca figure with just sticks and ropes. If you plant a stick in the ground and attach a rope to it, you can
walk in a circle by keeping your distance. Similarly, by varying the distance you can make spirals. You can vary the distance in precise amounts (more or less) by tying equidistant knots in the rope. But really its far less complicated than it seems. Another researcher claims that if you walk along the lines you can get a pretty clear picture of what they are, and in order to prove it he tried to make a figure that he drew on paper first, and then when viewed from above it was a pretty good match.
Yet another possibility is that they could have made an actual hot air baloon. They had better cloth than most modern parachutes and someone actually made a primitive baloon with the materials available around that flew up to 400ft for about 3 minutes, after being filled with hot air from one of their fire pits.
I find it hard to believe that such a primitive people understood any of the underlying principles of baloon flight however... though it could have been discovered accidentally.