The Nazca Lines: A Glorious Artwork On The Earth’s Canvas
Some parts of non-western archeology have entered into popular culture. At least a little bit. But even then, people are still not what is going on with them – they lack context. Nowhere is this more true than with the Nazca Lines. People know they are some giant lines, maybe they know they are in South America somewhere. But who made them? And when? And how many of them are there? Let’s dive in, to the Nazca lines.
The Naza Lines: The Basics
The Nazca Lines are a group of very large artworks drawn in the Peruvian desert from 500 BCE and 500 ACE in Peru. By very large, we mean enormous, some of them cover more than a kilometer. And there are hundreds of them, the total length of all of the lines together is more than 1,300 kilometers. They are very narrow and shallow, only about 10 to 15 centimeters deep and wide. They were made by removing the top layer of soil and filling it in with the deeper solid underneath. Most of the lines are simple geometrical shapes and patterns. However, they also include pictures of animals, human figures, trees, and flowers. Regardless, all the shapes are made from one continuous line.
While they are amazing, it’s not too hard to imagine how they were made. If you are careful, have a good sense of space and measure where you walk, you can make such things without any particularly sophisticated technology (you don’t need satellites or GPS or anything). But it would have required practice, and a fair few people, working very carefully for a long period of time. And they weren’t designed to be viewed from hills or anything, they are all clearly drawn to be viewed from space. So much so that a lot of the drawings were only discovered in the last ten years, with satellite imagery.
The lines were built by the Nazca people – a civilization that lived in the area from roughly 500 BCE to 500 ACE. We don’t know a lot about the Nazca people. We know where they lived in is one of the driest areas on Earth, the Nazca desert. This is why the lines survived so well, because it almost never rains. They probably wouldn’t have survived anywhere else on Earth. We do have a fair bit of other artifacts from the Nazca people, some pottery, some carvings, but not a lot has survived the harsh desert.
It is very hard to know why these lines were built. Like all art and monuments, the answer is clearly, because they wanted to. It was really important to them. Theories range from them being used as observatories, pointing to particular stars and events in the sky, to being sacrifices for gods, who looked directly down upon them. Regardless it was clearly some sort of deep spiritual or religious significance, one that we will probably never really understand.
The Nazca Lines: What can we learn?
We have a very narrow definition of visual art. We think of paintings and drawings. Normally in a gallery behind glass. And those are great – don’t get us wrong. But the creative output of the human race is so much more varied than that. Imagine having a field trip to the Nazca lines, instead of some galleries? Instead of wandering around a rarefied and elite gallery, worried about not understanding the art, or saying the wrong thing, you went for a drive to a hill and watched massive cat drawings? We reckon that’d get some kids a fair bit more excited about art in school.
The Nazca lines represent just how creative we can be as a species. The fact that a small group of people got together and drew massive animals into the desert, so large they can be seen from space is truly a triumph of the human spirit. The fact that they survived and we are still talking about them more than 2,000 years later, viewing them online from pictures taken by satellites, probably pretty similar to the gods the Nazca people imagined, is truly incredible.
A final thing to note – the lines are in danger. This isn’t surprising – they are so fragile – genuinely just tiny scuffs in the desert that even one or two floods would probably destroy. Firstly there is just general damage from climate. Secondly, there have recently been some squatters on the land, near a few of the lines that have done some damage. Thirdly, international damage has been done to them – Greenpeace even set up a banner near a few of the sites, protesting something, and did some pretty serious damage to a line. Like so much of non-western history and art, it is being taken for granted, and may fade completely from this world, unless we choose a different path.
