15.09.09 Road trip to Nazca Lines and Nazca Cemetery

This morning we are greeted at our hotel door by three growling American muscle cars, two 1980s Dodges and a Ford, to take us on a road trip to the famous Nazca Lines. Driving across the Peruvian desert on the hazy Pan-American highway we felt like we were in some old American movie. Our chocolate brown Dodge chugged along at a fair old speed but it was obvious not all cylinders were firing as we dragged behind on the hills.
From an old American muscle car straight into an ultra modern micro aeroplane to tour the Nazca lines from the air. The Nazca culture pre-dates the Incas by 1800 years with initial evidence dating back to 300 BC. No one yet knows why they drew such elaborate designs in the desert. Many have tried to explain with theories such as ‘the designs were used as an astronomical calendar which mapped the constellations’ and ‘the designs were not actually Nazca, they were mapping a giant alien runway’.
Both theories have been dismissed and it is more the case that the Nazca made the designs to represent the flora and fauna they saw around them and the immense lines form a map of the natural aqueducts under the sand which they used for irrigation.
In any case the designs took hundreds of years to complete; the desert floor is actually more like a mix of rock and clay as opposed to sand, and the Nazca made the lines by moving the rocks. This dedication would suggest that the lines’ purpose was more of a higher, spiritual one, perhaps as an offering to the gods above.
The Nazca desert cemetery, ‘Chauchilla’, is an eerie link to the ancient civilisation as it reveals the mummification techniques and burial practises used by the Nazcas. We are able to view the bones and mummified corpses purely because the entire site was looted by grave-robbers in the 1940s who were after the precious metals, ceramics and textiles which were buried with the bodies and they left the remainder scattered across the 2km site. They were able to identify the graves because the Nazca had marked the desert floor with squares and circles indicating their presence. As we walk from tomb to tomb the surrounding desert is littered with human bones and shards of pottery. Our guide explains the ritualistic nature of the Nazca, a culture which sacrificed women and children to their gods as a prayer for more rain and better crops. They decapitated them, their heads being buried separately to their bodies. However, when the victims’ bodies were buried, a pumpkin ‘head’ replaced their decapitated one, as it was believed they may need a new head for the afterlife. Other gory practises included binding babies’ heads across the forehead in order to deform their skulls into growing in an elongated form. This was reserved for only the important families in the community in order to distinguish them from their lowly subjects. And, to demonstrate their strength in warfare Nazca chieftains would ‘wear’ the decapitated heads of their defeated enemies on their belts as a warning to any other would-be warriors.
A perfectly preserved woman was excavated and her skin, hair and nails are all intact. The Nazca used a similar mummification technique to that of the Egyptians- binding the body in layers of cotton which absorbed the water from the skin therefore preserving it.