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Carving the earth
Time: 2:39
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The Nazca created immense geoglyphs under the relentless desert sun known today as the Nazca Lines, created between 200 BC and 700 AD. The lines are shallow designs made in the ground by removing the ubiquitous reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes; more than seventy are designs of animal, bird, fish or human figures. The largest figures are over 200 metres (660 ft) across. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but they generally ascribe religious significance to them, as they were major works that required vision, planning and coordination of people to achieve.
This is from a documentary from National Geographic.
Early Nazca geoglyphs were often formed in the shapes of deities and animals. But several centuries later they were building much larger, more geometric shapes. Regardless of shape, their construction was simple but effective. Using rudimentary surveying techniques, specialists marked up the geoglyphs with wooden poles and cotton strings. While they plotted out the figure shape, workers cleared stones.
As you can see here, the soil is covered by these dark stones, and below you find the buried light silt. And if you remove the dark stone, you will have a line. Villagers piled discarded stones along the sides. This border help shield the lines from the wind and the arid desert climate did the rest, preserving them through the centuries. These huge geoglyphs would have taken many days to construct, and out on the pampas there's no water or shade.
Water was the ancient Nazcas' most precious commodity, and by 400 AD, a cycle of droughts put their very existence in jeopardy.
Report mistakesGEOGLYPHS= Big pictures made on the ground. (coming from the Greek word GEO= earth and GLYPH= representation).
DEITIES= gods.
LARGER= bigger.
REGARDLESS OF SHAPE= It doesn't matter what shape they are.
RUDIMENTARY= simple and basic, with no advanced technology.
SURVEYING TECHNIQUES= techniques to measure the land.
BELOW= under it.
SILT= a sedimentary rock, soft.
REMOVE= take away.
VILLAGERS= People from the village.
PILED= If you pile things you accumulate them by putting them one on top of the other.
DISCARDED= Something discarded is something that you throw away because you don't need it for the task you're doing.
SHIELD= Protect.
ARID= Very dry weather or landscape.
HUGE= very big, immense.
PAMPAS= Big areas of land with grass and no trees. They are called savannah in Africa and pampa in America. But on this video they use the word incorrectly because the Nazca desert is not a savannah, it's a desert and there's no grass.
SHADE= An area protected from direct sunlight.
PRECIOUS= valuable, important.
COMMODITY= something useful that can be turned to commercial or other advantage. For example: wood, iron, oil, fruit, cotton, gold, silk, etc. You can use wood to make timber or furniture, you can use iron to make a machine, you can use fruit to eat, you can use silk to make a dress.
DROUGHTS= a long period of time without rain.
IN JEOPARDY= in danger.
