Nazca culture (even if the figures on the desert were finer and less folkish than the figures on the pots). But other questions troubled him. What was the point of this colossal creation when its makers, who did not have the aeroplane, could never have seen them properly? How could a people of simple peasants and warriors have mastered their superlative surveying technique without a knowledge of higher mathematics?
By chance Kosok timed his visit to coincide with the Winter Solstice, 21 June, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. That evening at sunset he was crossing the Pampa where several lines ran in an east-west direction. He was delighted to find that the lower rim of the sun touched down at a point where one of the lines met the horizon. He decided that the line had been made for determining the date of the Winter Solstice. And he went on to speculate that all the lines and geometric forms were used as sightings to predict the risings and settings of the sun, moon and stars. The Nazca people, he said, had imprinted on the desert âthe largest astronomy book in the worldâ.
The Nazca Culture had been discovered in 1905 by the German Peruvianist Max Uhle. It was a smallish empire of warriors and peasant cultivators that flourished and declined between the second and eighth centuries of our era. The empire looked in two directions â across the Cordillera to the jungle, with its humming birds, its spider-monkeys and spiders; and to the sea coast, where white guano islands float on a heaving silvery sea. Nobody knows the real name of the Nazca people. First they were absorbed into the Inca and even earlier empires; then the Spaniards killed off the Indian population of these valleys and assured for them the anonymity of oblivion. One can but reconstruct their lives from the things they buried with their dead. And this is a rather hazardous business, since tomb-robbing is almost a national pastime and the robbers (the huaceros) have ransacked all but a few cemeteries. Seen from the air, the sides of the valleys are pockmarked with their holes.
On their patchwork of fields, irrigated by the annual run-off from the Andes, the people of Nazca grew the potato, the sweet potato, the avocado, the chile pepper, the lima bean, maize, manioc, pineapples, guavas and a multitude of littleknown grains and fruit and vegetables. They had fishing boats and rafts which could only skim one of the worldâs best fishing grounds. For meat they ate llama and large quantities of guinea pig. They knitted and wove some of the most exquisite textiles the world has ever seen. They used every inch of the valley-floor for. cultivation and stationed their houses, their temples and their cemeteries on the desert rim.
On the whole they seem to have been a cheerful and quite democratic people, well aware of the comic possibilities of life, and very unlike the character of their sinister northern neighbours, the Mochica. They did, however, share at least one of the Mochicaâs less pleasant customs â the cult of the severed head, preferably the head of a defeated enemy.
In trying to explain the existence of the Nazca observatory, Kosok outlined a theory of civilisation that has best been expounded by the German historian Kornelius Wittfogel. Wittfogel, himself a refugee from the politics of terror, saw an ominous continuum between the age of the Pyramids and the modern totalitarian state. In his scheme, the early empires of Peru, like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, were âhydraulic civilisationsâ, that is, civilisations which owe their existence and their ideology to waterworks. He maintained that wherever you found large-scale irrigated agriculture, you found slave gangs and overseers. You found a population explosion and the emergence of a centralised state, with military dictators and foreign wars, whose purpose was to ensure a supply of cheap or free labour, and to purchase peace at home by sowing chaos
By chance Kosok timed his visit to coincide with the Winter Solstice, 21 June, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. That evening at sunset he was crossing the Pampa where several lines ran in an east-west direction. He was delighted to find that the lower rim of the sun touched down at a point where one of the lines met the horizon. He decided that the line had been made for determining the date of the Winter Solstice. And he went on to speculate that all the lines and geometric forms were used as sightings to predict the risings and settings of the sun, moon and stars. The Nazca people, he said, had imprinted on the desert âthe largest astronomy book in the worldâ.
The Nazca Culture had been discovered in 1905 by the German Peruvianist Max Uhle. It was a smallish empire of warriors and peasant cultivators that flourished and declined between the second and eighth centuries of our era. The empire looked in two directions â across the Cordillera to the jungle, with its humming birds, its spider-monkeys and spiders; and to the sea coast, where white guano islands float on a heaving silvery sea. Nobody knows the real name of the Nazca people. First they were absorbed into the Inca and even earlier empires; then the Spaniards killed off the Indian population of these valleys and assured for them the anonymity of oblivion. One can but reconstruct their lives from the things they buried with their dead. And this is a rather hazardous business, since tomb-robbing is almost a national pastime and the robbers (the huaceros) have ransacked all but a few cemeteries. Seen from the air, the sides of the valleys are pockmarked with their holes.
On their patchwork of fields, irrigated by the annual run-off from the Andes, the people of Nazca grew the potato, the sweet potato, the avocado, the chile pepper, the lima bean, maize, manioc, pineapples, guavas and a multitude of littleknown grains and fruit and vegetables. They had fishing boats and rafts which could only skim one of the worldâs best fishing grounds. For meat they ate llama and large quantities of guinea pig. They knitted and wove some of the most exquisite textiles the world has ever seen. They used every inch of the valley-floor for. cultivation and stationed their houses, their temples and their cemeteries on the desert rim.
On the whole they seem to have been a cheerful and quite democratic people, well aware of the comic possibilities of life, and very unlike the character of their sinister northern neighbours, the Mochica. They did, however, share at least one of the Mochicaâs less pleasant customs â the cult of the severed head, preferably the head of a defeated enemy.
In trying to explain the existence of the Nazca observatory, Kosok outlined a theory of civilisation that has best been expounded by the German historian Kornelius Wittfogel. Wittfogel, himself a refugee from the politics of terror, saw an ominous continuum between the age of the Pyramids and the modern totalitarian state. In his scheme, the early empires of Peru, like those of Egypt and Mesopotamia, were âhydraulic civilisationsâ, that is, civilisations which owe their existence and their ideology to waterworks. He maintained that wherever you found large-scale irrigated agriculture, you found slave gangs and overseers. You found a population explosion and the emergence of a centralised state, with military dictators and foreign wars, whose purpose was to ensure a supply of cheap or free labour, and to purchase peace at home by sowing chaos
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