Mystery on the Mesa

The long strips crisscrossing the desert veer from a straight line by only a few yards every mile. The accompanying triangles, rectangles and trapezoids are laid out with equal precision. In their midst are drawings of huge spiders, a giant nine-fingered monkey, birds, fish and reptiles, some of them so large they are recognizable only from the air. For decades these ancient patterns, spreading across 30 miles of Peru's desolate Nazca plain, have confounded archaeologists. Why were they so painstakingly etched out of the bleak mesa? Could they have been signals to the gods, or--as the current movie Chariots of the Gods? suggests--to extraterrestrial visitors?

The drawings are at least 1,000 years old, the work of a sophisticated pre-Inca people who survived with the help of elaborate irrigation systems. To create their desert art, these early Peruvians removed strips of the topmost layer of stone, piece by piece, exposing the lighter-colored dirt underneath. They apparently made their precise markings without modern tools or surveying gear or even a high platform from which to view their progress. But how?

After nearly half a lifetime of sleeping in an adobe hut, subsisting on goat cheese and fruit and working under a blistering sun, Maria Reiche, a tall, lean 70-year-old German scientist, is satisfied that she can answer many of the questions raised by the Nazcan figures.

"It's basically simple," says Reiche, who was trained in mathematics at Hamburg University. First, she explains, the artists apparently worked out their designs in advance on small 6-ft. by 6-ft. plots still visible near many of the larger figures. On these dirt sketch pads, she says, they could break down each drawing into its component parts. Straight lines could be drawn by stretching a rope between two stakes. Curves represented more of a challenge. The ancient draftsmen apparently dealt with it by breaking each curve into smaller, linked arcs. Recognizing that the arcs represented sections of the circumferences of different-sized circles, they could have anchored one end of a string to a rock or stake at the center of the appropriate circle and with the other end traced out the necessary arc. Once the designers established the proper relationships between lines, arcs, center points and radii for a figure, says Reiche, they could plot them on a large scale for the full-sized drawing--even without an overview of the whole area. Proof of her theory, she says, lies in the fact that many drawings are pockmarked with stones and holes at points that are indeed centers for appropriate arcs.

A greater puzzle perhaps is what prompted such prodigious effort. In his bestseller Chariots of the Gods? (on which the movie is based), Science Fiction Writer Erich von Daeniken says that the lines--which do, in fact, resemble airport runways--may have been landing strips for otherworldly visitors. A huge, cliffside trident, overlooking the nearby Bay of Pisco, may even have pointed the way to them, he says. But most scholars, including Reiche, flatly reject that farfetched idea; for one thing, no extraterrestrial artifacts have ever been found at the site. Scientific observers lean to a more down-to-earth explanation first proposed by the late archaeologist Paul Kosok of Long Island University, who found the drawings in 1939 while looking for ancient irrigation systems.

Astronomy Book. Kosok noticed that some of the lines are aimed directly at points on the horizon where the sun rises on the longest and shortest days of the year. Other strips point toward the spot where the Pleiades (a constellation considered important by many ancient peoples) rose during the era when the drawings were made. Calling the desert plateau possibly "the largest astronomy book in the world," Kosok speculated that it was used by Nazca's astronomer-priests to mark the passage of the seasons--important to people who cherished every drop of rainfall--and perhaps even to predict eclipses. In his recent book, Beyond Stonehenge, Astronomer Gerald Hawkins disagrees. He says that he could find no more than an apparently random matchup between the lines and the sun, moon or stars.

There is scholarly agreement on one point: unless protective measures are" taken soon, the markings (which have been preserved by the dry climate) may not survive much longer. The Pan American Highway cuts directly through some of the drawings, and many of them have already been churned up beyond recognition by car wheels. Several years ago, while a Peruvian armored column was maneuvering in the area, it wiped out the head of a huge lizard. Only the fiery Maria Reiche's determination acts as a buffer between the drawings and their elimination by civilized man.

Often she will intentionally misdirect tourists away from the site, or warn them, only half in jest, that if they appear at night they might find her dancing in the nude across the desert. She has also waged a singlehanded campaign to get the Peruvian government to fence off the huge area. So far it has refused to foot the bill.

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