The Nazca Drawings
We have been reading about the people who live in Europe, Africa, and Asia. But over on the other side of the world, other ancient civilizations lived. Like the people of ancient Africa, the people of the Americas didn’t leave written records behind them.
So we don’t know as much about them as we know about the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Greeks. But the people of the Americas did leave artifacts behind them—ancient buildings, ruined villages, and mysterious earth mounds.If you put your finger on the Fertile Crescent again, and this time go left, you’ll go across the Mediterranean Sea and out into the Atlantic Ocean. And if you keep going across the Atlantic Ocean, you’ll come to two continents (big masses of land) linked together in the middle by a narrower strip. These are the Americas. The top continent is called North America, and the bottom continent is called South America. We call the strip in the middle Central America.
South America has mountains all along one edge and flat, fertile land in the middle. Tribes of ancient people lived both in the mountains and down in the jungles of the flat lands. Like the people of ancient Mesopotamia, the people of ancient South America grew crops, kept animals, hunted, and caught fish. They ate cassava, just like the people of ancient Africa. As a matter of fact, they learned how to dry cassava roots and grind them up into a powder. They used this powder to make a kind of pudding that you’ve probably eaten yourself—tapioca pudding.
One of these South American tribes was called the Nazca. They lived along the rivers of South America in a place that is now called Peru. The Nazca left behind them one of the strangest mysteries of ancient times.
More than two thousand years after the Nazca lived in South America, an airplane flew over Peru. The pilot looked down.
He saw a drawing of a monkey—a drawing that covered hundreds of feet of ground. The lines of the drawing were scraped into the earth. From down on the ground, the drawings couldn’t be seen. The lines just looked like old roads, or gashes in the ground. But from up in the air, those lines made pictures.Soon, flyers discovered more enormous pictures: a spider, a pelican more than one thousand feet tall, a hummingbird, and flowers. They also found spirals, squares, and other patterns carved into the ground. There were over three hundred line drawings and patterns there on the earth.
Because there is very little rain in the area where the Nazca drawings were made, the lines have lasted for over a thousand years. A highway was built across some of the drawings, and others have been damaged by cars driving across them or by people scuffing at the lines with their feet. But many of the drawings are still intact. Look on the next page for a map of the drawings. Can you tell what they are?
So how did the Nazca people make these drawings? After all, they couldn’t fly. They couldn’t get up in the air to see what their finished drawings looked like. Making a line drawing on the ground must have been like drawing with your eyes closed. Do you think you could draw these pictures with your eyes closed? It probably wouldn’t look much like a bird when you were finished.
No one has been able to solve the mystery of the Nazca drawings. The best guess we can make is that the Nazca people were very good at mathematics. They could figure out how long each line should be, where it should turn, and where it should meet the next line through doing calculations. Another theory is that the Nazca artists used the position of the stars to help them with their drawings. But the Nazca civilization ended about 1500 years ago. So we will never know the answer to this question.
