Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Holly fro and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and kind
Speaker 1: of we're doing this topic today because we've gotten several
Speaker 1: requests to do some South American history and so many
Speaker 1: and can we can we talk for a second about
Speaker 1: why we have not had a ton of them? Yeah,
Speaker 1: much of the information is in languages that neither of
Speaker 1: us read fluently. Yeah, and it makes me really sad
Speaker 1: because I'll find some awesome, awesome historical figure from South
Speaker 1: American history, and I'll be able to find like a
Speaker 1: short Encyclopedia article in English, and then anything more substantive
Speaker 1: is in Spanish or Portuguese or another language that I
Speaker 1: sadly do not read well enough to use as a
Speaker 1: history source on this podcast. Yeah, that's a general trickiness
Speaker 1: in multiple areas. I mean, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: there's a lot of African history I would love to
Speaker 1: cover that it's a bit hard to find source material,
Speaker 1: or if we do find source material, it's deeply biased
Speaker 1: in the favor of whoever was colonizing. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: sort of why sometimes these don't get as much play
Speaker 1: as we would like. But luckily today's topic has been
Speaker 1: studied by so many people that there's loads of information
Speaker 1: out there. Uh. And that is the Nasca lines. So
Speaker 1: to give it some contexts, about two hundred miles southeast
Speaker 1: of Lima, Peru, nestled right between the Andes Mountains and
Speaker 1: the Pacific Ocean, there are these huge lines etched into
Speaker 1: the desert. When I see lines, that's not really entirely
Speaker 1: accurate in terms of characterization. You've probably seen photos of
Speaker 1: these before, but if you haven't, they're really really astonishing.
Speaker 1: We're talking about large scale designs. Uh. And some of
Speaker 1: them are things you would recognize, like a monkey or
Speaker 1: a spider or a condor. There's a hummingbird. Others are geometric.
Speaker 1: And because they're etched into rock and have survived thousands
Speaker 1: of years, this was clearly like a serious amount of
Speaker 1: work that went into the creation of these. The environment
Speaker 1: in this part of the world has really helped preserve
Speaker 1: the work of the Nasca. It's a really arid climate
Speaker 1: and there's not a lot of erosion, which means that
Speaker 1: even tracks from chariots that were left in the sixteenth
Speaker 1: century by warring Conquestador factions are all still visible in
Speaker 1: some places. Yeah, there are like, uh, tire tracks from
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties in that area that you can still
Speaker 1: clearly see footprints last for hundreds of years. It's unusual
Speaker 1: because it is close to the ocean, yet it is very,
Speaker 1: very dry. Uh. And for decades, these designs caused a
Speaker 1: lot of head scratching because we didn't understand why a
Speaker 1: culture would devote so much energy to creating art that
Speaker 1: we thought they couldn't really see themselves because these are
Speaker 1: so expansive, and we'll talk a little bit about their
Speaker 1: size in a moment that you know, it seems you'd
Speaker 1: only see them from the air, right. A lot of
Speaker 1: the photos of them that exists are taken from from aircraft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they've been featured in like coffee table books
Speaker 1: of like aerial archaeology. Uh. And it is hard to
Speaker 1: imagine how they would ever look like anything from ground level.
Speaker 1: But UH, scientists and researchers are continuing to uncover new
Speaker 1: information about these pieces of landscape art. We're learning more
Speaker 1: all the time. The picture keeps getting fuller, and there's
Speaker 1: still a good bit of theory in the mix. Though
Speaker 1: we think we've figured out what these lines might be about,
Speaker 1: or some researchers who think they've figured it out. There
Speaker 1: have been worrying opinions on this UH, but there's no
Speaker 1: you know, final Oh, it's all been made clear by
Speaker 1: this discovery. And as a note, there is a modern
Speaker 1: day town of Nasco, which has a population of about
Speaker 1: thirty thou people. But for this discussion, when we use
Speaker 1: the word Nasco, we're referring to the ancient culture or
Speaker 1: the location of the glyphs. Right. So, as I said before,
Speaker 1: the Nascar region one of the driest places on Earth.
Speaker 1: It often goes more in a year without rain uh.
Speaker 1: And the Pampa, the Nasca desert sometimes it will get
Speaker 1: like a rainfall of twelve minutes a year, so very
Speaker 1: very little moisture going on. The Nasca culture, which predates
Speaker 1: the Incans, was in its flourished phase between two hundred
Speaker 1: and six hundred, and there are to these lines, more
Speaker 1: than eight hundred straight lines. There are more than three
Speaker 1: hundred geometric figures UH and roughly seventy animal or plant designs.
Speaker 1: The whole collection of drawing spans a huge area. Some
Speaker 1: of the geometric shapes are more than six miles across,
Speaker 1: and some of the straight lines are thirty miles long.
Speaker 1: All together, the area that the shapes span is nearly
Speaker 1: five hundred square kilometers or a hundred nineties square miles.
Speaker 1: And just as a note on the thirty miles long one,
Speaker 1: I have heard differing or red differing statements about the
Speaker 1: longest line. Some listed as low as nine, some go
Speaker 1: as high as thirty. I think there are probably some
Speaker 1: that maybe have petered out, and it's hard to discern
Speaker 1: for certain, So some are attributing length that may or
Speaker 1: may not be attributed by other people, depending on if
Speaker 1: it's faded, if it's uh, you know, maybe it was
Speaker 1: one of the lines, maybe it was part of the
Speaker 1: natural landscape, So just know that going in UH and
Speaker 1: researchers believe that all of the designs were created using
Speaker 1: the same methodology, so basically using wooden spades to kind
Speaker 1: of shave or carve off the top layer of the
Speaker 1: rock and expose the lighter sediment beneath. Some of the
Speaker 1: drawings are actually carved on top of older ones, so
Speaker 1: there was clearly a long term tradition of making these
Speaker 1: glyphs um and that tradition might have evolved over time.
Speaker 1: The age of the drawings and even the age of
Speaker 1: the culture have been debated and the dates revised as
Speaker 1: people keep analyzing all the evidence. It'll probably be even
Speaker 1: further revised as time goes on. But a number that
Speaker 1: you'll see pretty often in the research is that the
Speaker 1: lines date back to only five hundred years, although some
Speaker 1: newer data suggested that at least some of them are
Speaker 1: even older than that. The UNESCO listing for the site
Speaker 1: gives the date range of between five d b C
Speaker 1: to five hundred C, and the designs are grouped into
Speaker 1: two types. There um geoglyphs and biomorphs, and the geoglyphs
Speaker 1: are geometric shapes and the biomorphs says you may have
Speaker 1: guests feature animal or human shapes. Uh. In addition to
Speaker 1: the ones that I mentioned earlier, there's also a hummingbird,
Speaker 1: there's a fish, a flamingo, and iguana, a fox, a whale,
Speaker 1: and even others. But just to keep it confusing, often
Speaker 1: when you're looking at research, the whole group is often
Speaker 1: lumped under the geoglyph name, rather than separating out into
Speaker 1: those two separate geoglyph and biomorphs. Though there was some
Speaker 1: archaeological work being done in Nasca in the late nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties by a proving archaeologists who spotted some of the
Speaker 1: designs while hiking in the nearby foothills. The lines weren't
Speaker 1: really known of outside the area until a commercial pilot
Speaker 1: spotted them in the thirties and sometimes UH that date
Speaker 1: is another one that UH is a little fuzzy. In
Speaker 1: resources that you'll read, some will listen as late twenties,
Speaker 1: other in the early thirties. But once the impressive geoglyphs
Speaker 1: were known to the outside world, almost immediately, of course,
Speaker 1: people were trying to figure out what they were about.
Speaker 1: Some positive that they were inking roads, some suggested that
Speaker 1: they were irrigation lines. UH. The nearby Sarah Blanco Mountain,
Speaker 1: which is technically actually a sand dune, but it's like
Speaker 1: the largest standing in the world, I think, or ranks
Speaker 1: up there. UH is the primary water source for the
Speaker 1: area because of an underground reservoir, and at least one
Speaker 1: of the triangular geoglyphs runs along the water veins that
Speaker 1: are in that mountain. Another favorite, as is always a favorite,
Speaker 1: everything cool. It comes up in every piece of sort
Speaker 1: of difficult to explain or we have done the research
Speaker 1: that finds the key Yet aliens aliens their alien landing
Speaker 1: strips mostly popular in the nineteen sixties, also not particularly surprising.
Speaker 1: It was perpetuated mostly by Eric von Danikin, who has
Speaker 1: made a career as an author specializing in writing about
Speaker 1: alien interaction with humans, especially in early cultures. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Dannikin actually really angered one of the people who really
Speaker 1: dedicated their lives to studying this with his theories. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then others have applied the concept that they have
Speaker 1: religious meaning, and there are variations on this one that
Speaker 1: the lines are paths to rituals, or that their messages
Speaker 1: to the gods, ETCETERA. American Paul Kazak, who was a
Speaker 1: professor of history at Long Island University, is often credited
Speaker 1: with being the first person to seriously study these lines.
Speaker 1: His interest was really irrigation, and it was the theory
Speaker 1: that the lines could have been complex water routing ditches
Speaker 1: that led him to Peru. He almost immediately realized that
Speaker 1: the lines were just too shallow to carry water. On
Speaker 1: June twenty ninety one, he saw that the straight line
Speaker 1: he was standing near pointed directly at the setting sun,
Speaker 1: and he believed that it was a marker for the
Speaker 1: winter solstice. In the meantime, a young woman named Maria Reicha,
Speaker 1: who was a mathematician from Dresden, Germany and spoke five languages,
Speaker 1: also started analyzing and mapping the drawings in Uh. And
Speaker 1: she came to that because she had actually gone to
Speaker 1: South America initially to tutor a diplomat's children, but then
Speaker 1: started working as a translator in Lima. And it was
Speaker 1: through her translation work that she actually met Paul kazak
Speaker 1: Uh in Lima, and the professor really became a mentor
Speaker 1: to Reicha, and once she learned the lines, it was
Speaker 1: kind of I don't I don't want to over romanticize
Speaker 1: it and say it was a love at first sight thing,
Speaker 1: but she pretty quickly just decided that was her life's work. Uh.
Speaker 1: She really devote the rest of her life to them,
Speaker 1: and she even lived in a small desert house near
Speaker 1: the Nasca lines to serve as their protector. So, even
Speaker 1: though it's this huge expanse, this one woman kind of
Speaker 1: out there in the desert living by herself really felt
Speaker 1: like she had to keep a watch on everything. And
Speaker 1: she became known as the lady of the lines, and
Speaker 1: she actually um as I said, she lived out her
Speaker 1: life there. She became a Peruvian citizen in at the
Speaker 1: age of ninety one. Uh. And it was very highly regarded,
Speaker 1: I think by the Peruvian people and by the government. Uh.
Speaker 1: But her work with Kazak really in that early stage
Speaker 1: really formed the basis for the rest of her analysis.
Speaker 1: Right while working with him, six months after this winter
Speaker 1: Celsist revelation, she discovered a line that pointed to the
Speaker 1: sun during the summer solstice. This led Kassack to believe
Speaker 1: that they had uncovered a celestial calendar, and he characterized
Speaker 1: the Nasca Lines as the world's largest astronomy book. This
Speaker 1: really reminds me of Stonehenge, and how if you stand
Speaker 1: in certain places in Stonehenge you see specific they line
Speaker 1: up with specific astronomical events. Yeah. It's much bigger. It's much, much,
Speaker 1: much bigger than Stonehenge, but similarly mysterious. Yeah. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in Cossack left Peru. It was not his life's work,
Speaker 1: even though he loved it. Uh. But Maria stayed and
Speaker 1: she continued working, and she was really attempting to find
Speaker 1: a pattern or a system to all of the drawings,
Speaker 1: and she spent more than forty years mapping the area,
Speaker 1: and as part of her work, she even painstakingly restored
Speaker 1: portions of the glyphs that had been obscured over time.
Speaker 1: Some of them had accumulated duster debris, or the the
Speaker 1: layers that had been exposed had darkened from sunlight exposure
Speaker 1: or other elemental exposure, and she would pull those away,
Speaker 1: never altering the glyphs, but just you know, a little
Speaker 1: tidying and restoration. She believed that these drawings were trying
Speaker 1: the sun's path and position in the sky, and that
Speaker 1: the Nascar were using their knowledge of equinoxes to schedule
Speaker 1: when they should plant and harvest their crops. She also
Speaker 1: theorized that some of the glyphs were symbols correlated to
Speaker 1: the constellations and raik working you know, as a woman
Speaker 1: so low analyzing these phenomena. Uh, she was not taken seriously,
Speaker 1: and she initially published her findings in the late forties,
Speaker 1: shortly after Kazak left Um, and she her writings were
Speaker 1: pretty much met with ridicule. Yeah. Competing theorists all pointed
Speaker 1: out that the vast majority of the lines in the
Speaker 1: glyphs did not point to any celestial bodies. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of criticism that she had, you know,
Speaker 1: found she had kind of cherry picked a few things
Speaker 1: that lined up with her idea and then the things
Speaker 1: that didn't line up with She wasn't really um worried
Speaker 1: about or working into the bigger theory. But just before
Speaker 1: Rick had died, in one of her proteges, who was
Speaker 1: a senior astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago at
Speaker 1: the time, named Phillis B. Petluga, she actually came to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that the bioglyphs were referring to the heavens.
Speaker 1: She uh concluded that they aren't representing constellations but counter constellations,
Speaker 1: so sort of the irregular shaped dark patches within the
Speaker 1: milky way that you can see at night, like the
Speaker 1: the negative space between the stars that I do too.
Speaker 1: I looked around for a little more research on it
Speaker 1: and didn't find a whole lot. But that's one that
Speaker 1: I would like to delve further into because it's kind
Speaker 1: of cool and fascinating. But that's one of those things
Speaker 1: that I worry, uh, and I'm certainly not an astronomer.
Speaker 1: I worry that that might be again one of those
Speaker 1: things that it's easy to make work, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Uh, there are so many stars in the
Speaker 1: night sky that it would be easy to like if
Speaker 1: you rotated a little, everything kind of fits. Or again,
Speaker 1: I'm just postulating and I haven't looked at her research well.
Speaker 1: And because the North Pole gradually moves over time, the
Speaker 1: constellations are all in a slightly different place over time,
Speaker 1: which also makes it challenge. But that's a really neat concept.
Speaker 1: Now that we have all kinds of fancy computers that
Speaker 1: can adjust for those kinds of things, it's a little easier,
Speaker 1: but still it can be tricky that way. In there
Speaker 1: was a big Peruvian German research collaboration that started near
Speaker 1: the town of Palpa, and it has continued to study
Speaker 1: all the lines through the years since. Archaeologist Dr Marcus
Speaker 1: Randell of the German Archaeological Institute UH still leads a team,
Speaker 1: but he started in the late nineteen nineties and early
Speaker 1: two thousand's with the intent to take an in depth
Speaker 1: look at the Peruvian Nasca lines, and their approach to
Speaker 1: the lines was not so much starting with the lines
Speaker 1: and trying to just staring their meaning, but instead they
Speaker 1: really wanted to dig into the culture of the ancient
Speaker 1: Nasca to try to contextualize the Nasca lines and give
Speaker 1: a better basis for understanding their purpose. Uh. So it
Speaker 1: definitely took a deeper archaeological uh investigation at that point.
Speaker 1: I love that too, I do too. Oh, they did
Speaker 1: some really cool stuff. Because of grave robbers, the whole
Speaker 1: desert around this area is littered with all kinds of
Speaker 1: broken pottery and skeletons, basically a big mess as people
Speaker 1: have plundered Nasca burial grounds. But eighty years ago a
Speaker 1: number of intact mummies from the Nasca land were rescued
Speaker 1: and preserved. Yeah, they had been just sitting in a museum,
Speaker 1: but Ryan Dell's research team decided that they wanted to
Speaker 1: use modern technology to try to analyze those mummies as
Speaker 1: part of their kind of mission to do more of
Speaker 1: a cultural analysis. Uh. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: was interesting is that this uh their analyzes revealed dietary
Speaker 1: differences between some of them. These some were getting more
Speaker 1: animal protein and varied diets. Uh. And around the same
Speaker 1: time that these were going on, another part of the
Speaker 1: team found a burial shaft for a person who obviously
Speaker 1: had kind of a higher social standing who was adorned
Speaker 1: with a personal shrine. And these two pieces together, the
Speaker 1: variation in diets and the fact that they had found
Speaker 1: this shrine that clearly was different from previous burial sites,
Speaker 1: kind of locked together to lead researchers to believe that
Speaker 1: there was in fact a social class system at play
Speaker 1: in the Nasca culture. This is actually a pretty significant finding.
Speaker 1: It may seem like, well, duh, every culture has a
Speaker 1: class system and a social hierarchy, But for a long time,
Speaker 1: people had believed that the ancient Nasca were a peaceful
Speaker 1: tribe that didn't have that kind of structure. So there's
Speaker 1: a famous ceramic tableau called the Teo Plaque, which features
Speaker 1: multiple Nasca playing pan pipes, walking with dogs, and it
Speaker 1: was long held this iconic representation of a relaxed tribal
Speaker 1: life without much of a class system. Yeah. We uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I think, to put it in casual terms,
Speaker 1: I think people sort of thought of them as more
Speaker 1: like a the hippies of history, and they were just
Speaker 1: all cool with each other, chilling out, being groovy, enjoying
Speaker 1: the land. So there were then some theories now that
Speaker 1: they had established that there did appear to be a
Speaker 1: class system that the Nasca lines might have been commanded
Speaker 1: to be made by high ranking Naskins to mark their
Speaker 1: territory or show their prestige. Geoelectric tomography, which measures the
Speaker 1: electrical conductivity in the earth, was then used to try
Speaker 1: to find any undiscovered buildings or other structures that might
Speaker 1: inform this whole idea of a more socially stratified culture.
Speaker 1: The researchers did find other structures, and they pieced together
Speaker 1: that with other discoveries and eventually assembled a pretty compelling
Speaker 1: model of how the Nasca we're actually running a pretty
Speaker 1: successful trade empire, linking settlements and trade spots like beads
Speaker 1: on a necklace. Yeah. At the time, Uh, and I
Speaker 1: should say that the findings here were really expansive and
Speaker 1: they could easily be their own episode. But they sort
Speaker 1: of discovered that they could have traveled along what is
Speaker 1: now a dry portion of the river that was leading
Speaker 1: out to the ocean, and that they had all of
Speaker 1: these small settlements, you know, dotting along the way so
Speaker 1: that they could go a little trade rest, go a
Speaker 1: little trade rest. Uh. And uh, there were again in
Speaker 1: those findings that we're not going to dig deep into you,
Speaker 1: but I at least want to acknowledge them. They found
Speaker 1: some evidence that some of the glyphs and the structures
Speaker 1: that we've historically attributed to the Nasca were actually pre Nasca,
Speaker 1: and they trace it all the way back to like
Speaker 1: the migration down into South America. But for the scope
Speaker 1: of this one, we're gonna keep it simple with regard
Speaker 1: to the trade culture and that sort of uh other
Speaker 1: branch of the plot line of the Nasca and forcus
Speaker 1: back on the lines. So perhaps in the future we
Speaker 1: will do another one entirely on that, because there's some
Speaker 1: cool stuff involving links to the Neolithic Age that had
Speaker 1: not ever happened before. It's really really fascinating research. As
Speaker 1: we've said already, we're talking about one of the driest
Speaker 1: places on the planet. But in one small basin, which
Speaker 1: is the area where the Nasca culture is said to
Speaker 1: have flourished, there were at one point at least ten
Speaker 1: rivers which descended from the Andies. Steven S Hall, writing
Speaker 1: for National Geographic, described them pretty poetically as fragile ribbons
Speaker 1: of green surrounded by a thousand shades of brown. So
Speaker 1: most of these rivers would have each been dry for
Speaker 1: at least part of the year. This nextus point offered
Speaker 1: up this perfect fertile ground to support a settlement. It
Speaker 1: also came with a really high risk because the microclimate
Speaker 1: in that particular spot is really unstable. Any kind of
Speaker 1: small change, like a high pressure system moving through can
Speaker 1: comp com lately dry out the Nasca Valley. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: of the way the Andes rings the area, it's easy
Speaker 1: for um, some weather to get cut off my system
Speaker 1: moving over at etcetera. But at one point it really
Speaker 1: would have been an oasis. Uh, similar to other famous
Speaker 1: spots in terms of like civilization developments, which are often
Speaker 1: an oasis, you know, kind of up against the desert. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in this oasis, we know that the Nasca grew citrus,
Speaker 1: they grew grain, they grew maze. They had a really
Speaker 1: impressive well structure to bring water to all these crops,
Speaker 1: and a business built around trading some of the crops
Speaker 1: because they were so abundant. So in two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: German geographers took samples from the Andean Highlands where there's
Speaker 1: a climate archive basically the core drill that that we
Speaker 1: see a lot of times when we're studying long ago
Speaker 1: facets of the earth. So the drill core revealed to
Speaker 1: the researchers loam and even a snail, so there's proof
Speaker 1: that there was once a lot more moisture in the area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the permafrost there had really preserved things for quite some times.
Speaker 1: They were able to get a really deep sample. So
Speaker 1: between then and now, when it's known for its dry climate,
Speaker 1: we know that the water had to have left the region,
Speaker 1: and this, in the minds of many researchers, is really
Speaker 1: the key to understanding the Nasca lines. As more and
Speaker 1: more excavations have been done, there's been the same imagery
Speaker 1: that's popped up over and over on everything from everyday
Speaker 1: tools to sacred objects, some of which have been identified
Speaker 1: as likely weather deities. They look just like the earliest
Speaker 1: rock carvings, which are mostly on the hills surrounding the area,
Speaker 1: sort of like protectors. So as these researchers theorized more
Speaker 1: and more droughts were happening in the desert was advancing
Speaker 1: progressively into the Nasca plateau and really spelled out this
Speaker 1: the beginning of the end for the Nasca, and the
Speaker 1: Nasca believing that they had somehow yield the gods really
Speaker 1: stepped up their religious rituals, including their glyphmaking. Many of
Speaker 1: the animals that are featured in the biomorphs don't really
Speaker 1: live near the Navska. They are found more in rainforests
Speaker 1: on the other side of the Andes. So the current
Speaker 1: theory is that these figures are fertility prayers of a sort,
Speaker 1: asking the gods for the plenty of their neighbors, including water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there aren't monkeys there, but there is a monkey glyph.
Speaker 1: There aren't certainly aren't whales there, but there is a
Speaker 1: whale glyph. Uh. Some of the birds and other animals
Speaker 1: that they feature do not exist there, but again, right
Speaker 1: over the Andes and the rainforest they're plentiful, so it
Speaker 1: does make some sense certainly that they would be like,
Speaker 1: we would like what the neighbors have please. But the
Speaker 1: geometric sites researchers think are likely actually ritual sites. And
Speaker 1: there is a very cool project that was done where
Speaker 1: they put together a comp puter graphics model of the
Speaker 1: entire area and they developed it with information that the
Speaker 1: researchers had provided regarding ruins and settlement structures of the time.
Speaker 1: So it's a pretty comprehensive model of what would have
Speaker 1: been there. And in this uh uh CG version of
Speaker 1: the Nasca area, it shows that in fact, people could
Speaker 1: have seen the glyphs from many of the buildings in
Speaker 1: the region. Like they weren't necessarily tall, but they still
Speaker 1: would have had a better line of sight. Uh And
Speaker 1: this is a pretty significant break from the previous thinking
Speaker 1: that we talked about earlier that they were only visible
Speaker 1: from the sky. So that is, you know, a mistaken
Speaker 1: belief that has probably led many researchers down the wrong path,
Speaker 1: like um process of thought that oh, nobody could see these,
Speaker 1: why were they making them, and how they probably could
Speaker 1: actually see some of them. What's interesting about the geometric
Speaker 1: designs is that they're all lockable, they're mostly on the plateau,
Speaker 1: and this plus the revelation that you could see the
Speaker 1: glyphs from around the area, have led researchers to theorize
Speaker 1: that there were huge ritual spectacles that could be performed.
Speaker 1: There would be sort of like putting on a show
Speaker 1: for everyone to see, including the gods. Yeah, so kind
Speaker 1: of um religious theatricality. And it could very well be
Speaker 1: that the glyphs went from being pectoral to taking on
Speaker 1: this geometric approach because at that point the Nasca were hurrying.
Speaker 1: They knew that they were struggling and that they didn't
Speaker 1: really have time for a lot of artistic flourish. So
Speaker 1: they started focusing more on straighter lines, circles that could
Speaker 1: be drawn inside straight lines. They didn't have to really
Speaker 1: worry as much about mirroring images. It was more like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we've been doing this, we're not getting the God's attention,
Speaker 1: we're not gaining their favor. We have to do more
Speaker 1: and more and more, and we don't have time for
Speaker 1: all of the squiggles. Let's hurry, so which is kind
Speaker 1: of sad to think about. Also an interesting approach to
Speaker 1: this question of what these things are and why they're there.
Speaker 1: In two thousand, Rhyndale and his team made an interesting discovery.
Speaker 1: While archaeologists had noticed large man made mounds of stones
Speaker 1: that they suspected were ceremonial altars at the end of
Speaker 1: the trapezoidal glyphs before an excavation of one of them
Speaker 1: revealed fragments of a spondylist muscle seashell. This particular muscle
Speaker 1: is only found off the coast of Peru during El
Speaker 1: Nino events. This would have tied it to rainfall in
Speaker 1: the minds of the Nascar, So the shells found at
Speaker 1: some of these alt sites might have been offerings to
Speaker 1: the gods from the sea to encourage water. And this
Speaker 1: theory of water warship and request of the gods is
Speaker 1: also supported by the growing size of the geoglyphs in
Speaker 1: the later period of the ancient Nasca culture as they
Speaker 1: grew more desperate as I was talking about before, they
Speaker 1: would have wanted everyone in their villages and settlements to
Speaker 1: participate in the water rituals. So even uh, the spiral
Speaker 1: lines and some of the geometric glyphs, if they were
Speaker 1: walking them the way these researchers are suggesting as part
Speaker 1: of their ritual, it would have forced the worshippers to
Speaker 1: face one another over and over, kind of like if
Speaker 1: you've ever been through like a long queue in an
Speaker 1: amusement park and you keep seeing the same people back
Speaker 1: and forth. Uh, and it it would have as they
Speaker 1: moved through their steps kind of reinforce their sense of
Speaker 1: community and potentially strengthened their resolve to plead for the gods,
Speaker 1: for their favorite for the good of everyone like they were.
Speaker 1: Potentially this is one theory of course kind of reinforcing
Speaker 1: that idea that we all need to survive together, so
Speaker 1: we all need to be doing this. By five hundred
Speaker 1: to six hundred, the end of the Nasca was near.
Speaker 1: The water issue would have really been insurmountable at this point,
Speaker 1: And we know that by six fifty the Nasca had
Speaker 1: been replaced by the Way Empire, which had its roots
Speaker 1: in the Central Highlands. Yes, so since they weren't exclusive
Speaker 1: of Lee in this super dry area, they kind of
Speaker 1: had a stronger um cultural presence that they could branch out,
Speaker 1: but they always had that kind of more hospitable environment
Speaker 1: to return to you. And so, while there isn't enough
Speaker 1: evidence to definitively prove any of these theories, the celestial
Speaker 1: theory or certainly not the alien landing strip theory or
Speaker 1: even these sort of pretty well thought out water and
Speaker 1: God related theories, uh, the current frontrunner among researchers, given
Speaker 1: what we've been able to uncover, does seem to be
Speaker 1: the religious ritual usage as a means to try to
Speaker 1: save the culture. So to sort of wrap it up,
Speaker 1: the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization better known
Speaker 1: as UNESCO put the NASCAR GIOG lifts on the World
Speaker 1: Heritage List in and as I mentioned earlier, Maria Rika
Speaker 1: died in June at the age of four years after
Speaker 1: the lines were added to UNESCO's list, and there was
Speaker 1: talk at the time of her death that the lines
Speaker 1: should be named the Reicha Lines, but it appears that
Speaker 1: idea never really gained any traction. I would like to
Speaker 1: vote against that, please. I think it would be too
Speaker 1: problematic for the historical record at this point. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and I also think I sort of feel like the
Speaker 1: name of the culture that made them should be preserved
Speaker 1: there and not replaced with some other person. They have
Speaker 1: also been new figures discovered through the years, so even
Speaker 1: though Maria Reiko was very thorough and dedicated to the lines,
Speaker 1: there have been advances in photography that have revealed some
Speaker 1: glyphs that were previously really hard to make out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she mapped the vast majority of them, but they still
Speaker 1: do sometimes discover them. And while the Nasca Lines are
Speaker 1: not the only such g glyphs on Earth, they are
Speaker 1: perhaps the most famous. UH And even now there's a
Speaker 1: significant tourism trade built around carrying people out to the
Speaker 1: desert UH for aerial tours to see these massive landscape
Speaker 1: carvings from the past. It just kind of neat. I
Speaker 1: would like to go stuff in Peru. Yeah, delicious food
Speaker 1: even beyond the food. How my tourism is based entirely
Speaker 1: around what I can eat in different places. Uh. But yeah,
Speaker 1: they's amazing amazing archaeology and amazing amazing ancient culture. Yeah, preserved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it is one of those things where, like I
Speaker 1: said at the top, I think most people have probably
Speaker 1: seen pictures of these and maybe even heard a little
Speaker 1: bit about them, But when you realize how much research
Speaker 1: has been dedicated to them. I mean, even in doing this,
Speaker 1: there are so many archaeologists that we can't sort of
Speaker 1: step aside and talk about their individual work, so we
Speaker 1: focused on kind of the big ones. But there's just
Speaker 1: people are really enthralled by them. And Maria Reiche is
Speaker 1: not the only person who pretty much dedicated her entire ah,
Speaker 1: she dedicated her entire life. Other people, many people dedicate
Speaker 1: their careers to them. So it's they're engaging. I like them.
Speaker 1: I would love to walk them all well. And the
Speaker 1: fact that so many people have dedicated their lives to
Speaker 1: trying to puzzle out the mysteries of what these ancient
Speaker 1: sites were all about. Um makes it seem really silly
Speaker 1: that occasionally, like governments will come up with this cookie
Speaker 1: plan about what to do with nuclear waste and say,
Speaker 1: well if we market with these things, that will deter people.
Speaker 1: Like Okay, Now, in a thousand years, people are probably
Speaker 1: not going to be deterred. They're going to be walking
Speaker 1: around and trying to figure out what that was about. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and there is even am I thought about that a
Speaker 1: little bit while doing research. The big lizard glyph actually
Speaker 1: had its bisected by a highway that was built. I
Speaker 1: think it was that the that highway was worked on
Speaker 1: in Peru. And I wonder if you know, years and
Speaker 1: years and years from now, someone will look and be like,
Speaker 1: why was the lizard cutting ham And it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I was really not part of the origin old plan.
Speaker 1: But they won't know that Nope, or maybe they'll figure
Speaker 1: it out archaeology. It's so cool. Guess what. I also
Speaker 1: have listener mail. Please tell me what it says this
Speaker 1: time I now made us both smiles so big. Uh.
Speaker 1: It is from our listener Angela, and she says, I
Speaker 1: wanted to tell you first how much I enjoy your
Speaker 1: podcasts I listened on my drive to and from work
Speaker 1: each day at the public library. Uh and I love
Speaker 1: that you cover topics that have had a significant impact
Speaker 1: on our lives, but are just too narrow to be
Speaker 1: taught in a normal high school or college level history course.
Speaker 1: I am an amateur culinary historian. This is where I
Speaker 1: leaned forward a little bit while I was reading. We
Speaker 1: got really excited. So your recent episode on ice cream
Speaker 1: was a real treat for me, she quoted treats. After
Speaker 1: listening to it, I decided to cook three vintage ice
Speaker 1: cream recipes, vanilla, strawberry, and corn flake from books in
Speaker 1: my collection. You can see the results of my blog
Speaker 1: and maybe try the recipes at home if you like.
Speaker 1: The vanilla and strawberry were out of this world, and
Speaker 1: the corn flake is interesting. Okay, I will go on
Speaker 1: record the corn flake sounded the best to me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well and we um we we being me. I put
Speaker 1: a link to that on our Facebook and Twitter, to
Speaker 1: the cornflake one in particular, just because I feel like
Speaker 1: John Harvey Kellogg is rolling over in his grave that
Speaker 1: someone made ice cream out of corn flate is healthy,
Speaker 1: I know, out of his thing. That was all about
Speaker 1: not having dairy or sugar, meat or any of this
Speaker 1: other delicious stuff, and it was all about eating like fairy,
Speaker 1: bland things. But yeah, it makes me super happy that
Speaker 1: there's corn flake ice cream. I for sure want to
Speaker 1: try the corn flake ice cream recipe because it does
Speaker 1: sound really yell me to me. Yeah. Well, and I
Speaker 1: think she said later and Anna follow up that it
Speaker 1: tastes sort of like frozen corn flakes. Yeah. I reading
Speaker 1: her blog about it. I think she said I don't
Speaker 1: have it in front of me, that it tasted more
Speaker 1: interesting before it froze, but when it froze, it lost
Speaker 1: some of its kind of spices and um, more individual flavors,
Speaker 1: and that's when it started to just taste like frozen
Speaker 1: corn flakes. I'm fascinated. I'm in and one to make it.
Speaker 1: When you find me passed out diabetic shock from eating
Speaker 1: all the corpl like ice cream, you'll know what happened.
Speaker 1: I'll probably have to smile on my face. I've been
Speaker 1: really sad when that happened. I hope that doesn't happen.
Speaker 1: We try to eat well most of the time so
Speaker 1: that we can indulge in the CORNFLA. So thank you
Speaker 1: Angela because you have inspired me in the kitchen. I
Speaker 1: love the idea of being a culinary historian. Yes. Well,
Speaker 1: and we occasionally get all kinds of people who are
Speaker 1: doing blogs of historical recipes and things, and occasionally when
Speaker 1: we talk about what kind of video series we can do,
Speaker 1: we talk about some kind of historical cooking show. Yeah.
Speaker 1: All the food stuff makes us really happy, of course,
Speaker 1: because this food is great. We we've already been talking
Speaker 1: today about what's for lunch and we still have more
Speaker 1: episodes to record. Yeah, it's really all about food here.
Speaker 1: Uh So, if you would like to write to us
Speaker 1: and share risk, fees are thoughts, you can do so
Speaker 1: at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also
Speaker 1: touch base with us on Twitter atmost in history, on
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash history class stuff, or on Tumbler
Speaker 1: at mist in history dot tumbler dot com. We also
Speaker 1: have a board on pictests, which includes I pinned at
Speaker 1: one point Thomas Jefferson's vanilla ice cream recipe, although I
Speaker 1: think it's hard to make out the details to actually
Speaker 1: use it because it's handwritten and it's quite an elderly piece.
Speaker 1: It's a photograph of the original document. Uh if you
Speaker 1: would like to learn a little bit about something we
Speaker 1: touched on in today's podcast, if you can go to
Speaker 1: our website and search the word UNESCO and it will
Speaker 1: turn up what is a World Heritage site, so you'll
Speaker 1: get more of a sense of how those are selected
Speaker 1: uh and made into official sites. If you would like
Speaker 1: to research almost anything else in your mind you can
Speaker 1: think of, you can do so at our website. And
Speaker 1: that website is how Stop works dot com for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has
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