Making Tracks
Gordon Harris offers his own conclusions as to who laid down those old straight lines (from Northern Earth 68)
Thirteen years ago, irked by a conference at Cambridge on 'The Alignment of Ancient Sites', I wrote my first article for an earth mysteries magazine. Comparing Alfred Watkins' 'old straight tracks' with the lines in Nazca in Peru, I wrote: "Had he lived for another four years, until Paul Kosok discovered them, Watkins would surely have recognised the Peruvian tracks as being identical, and not merely similar, to his concept of leys'. In those days, such a view was considered quite mad, even amongst the lunatic fringe. But today, post-paradigm shift, we can read in no less a place than Paul Devereux' final editorial in The Ley Hunter2 that "the start of the unravelling of the true mystery of leys was facilitated [when] we started to look more closely at unarguably actual, physical lines on ancient landscapes", such as "the straight lines and pathways of prehistoric America". So let's look more closely at the lines of Nazca.
These features have been the subject of at least two popular books3,4 with inevitable limitations on the size of illustrations. The best ones that I have found are in the A4 size Peruanische Erdzeichen5. The double-page A3 size aerial photographs it contains are absolutely breathtaking and I urge readers to get sight of a copy if they can. It consists mainly of photographs and illustrations, with only eleven pages of descriptive text, in both German and English.
The soil on the plains of Nazca is alluvionic, hence soft, consisting of stones, sand and clay of a light yellow colour. On the flat surface, wind has removed some of the finer material, exposing stones, and a very thin crust has been oxidised to a brown colour. When the stones are removed and the oxidised crust disturbed, the fine yellow subsoil is exposed, which contrasts sharply with the stony brown surroundings. This, it is said, is how the drawings were made. "It is easy to remove these stones, one footstep is enough to uncover the lighter soil underneath and leave a marking that remains forever"5.
The drawings consist of hundreds of straight lines, zig-zags, spirals, geometric shapes such as triangles and trapezoids, and figures of birds and animals. "A great majority of straight lines have their origin in starlike centres, from which they radiate in different directions. Some of these centres have over twenty lines going out from them. Some of them are connecting lines to other centres, having lengths of up to ten kilometres"5. Graham Hancock's description of the lines is particularly evocative6: "straight lines more than five miles long, marching like Roman roads across the desert, dropping into dried out riverbeds, surmounting rocky outcrops, and never once deviating from true". Sound familiar, ley hunters? The pattern made by the lines is shown in Fig. l; it looks remarkably like the patterns made by 'old straight tracks' that I find traces of in this country1,7-11
The narrowest of the straight lines have widths of around 33 or 66 cm. "These lines are no more than slight indentures in the flat surface. Wider lines can have a depth of up to one foot. . . The geometric figures appear in a wide range of sizes, from four metres to over a kilometre in length"5. Given the enormous area covered by the lines and shapes, it would be interesting to calculate the weight of stones that had to be moved if they were made by the method described above.
Like all roads and tracks, the lines and shapes are practically impossible to date, but from fragments of pottery and wood found embedded in them, it is said that they are over 1000 years old. They could, of course, be much older.
The most remarkable of the drawings are the figures of birds and animals with dimensions up to 300 m. They are clearly older than, or contemporary with, the lines and shapes because the latter frequently cross and partially obliterate them. Their most distinctive characteristic is that they are made with a single continuous line (see Fig. 2).
How these figures were made is difficult to imagine. "None of the designs is small enough to be recognised from ground level... They show their true form only when seen from an altitude of several hundred feet6. "The exact transference to the ground of an elaborate figure on a scale at least two hundred times as large as that of the model is a complicated process well beyond the limitations of an illiterate people"5. The latter writer goes on to suggest that the figures were laid out using cords and stakes - without leaving footprints that remain forever?
Nowadays many more lines are appearing on the Nazca desert and sadly starting to obliterate the original ones. They are made by the vehicles of tourists, going to see the drawings for themselves. Although narrower, these wheel tracks are just as clear on aerial photographs as the older lines, achieving the same effect by breaking up the thin brown crust to reveal the soft yellow subsoil, and by pressing the surface stones into it. Thus, it would be easy to reproduce the Nazca drawings these days, using some sort of vehicle, without necessarily removing a single stone. For most of the straight lines a simple groundsman's roller would probably suffice. The triangles and trapezoids could be made by going backwards and forwards along radial lines (but the orderly piles of stones on a few of these shapes remain a puzzle). For the animal figures, it would not be beyond today's technology to devise some thing remotely guided, like those machines for detonating terrorist bombs, or, dare I say it, a moon-rover, but leaving a single track and reproducing an image on a lap-top! All without leaving a single footprint.
As seen in Fig. 2, the distinctive characteristic of the figures is that they are made with a single continuous line. If you draw them with pencil and paper, the main constraint is that the pencil must always remain in contact with the paper. This constraint is the very one imposed by the force of gravity if you were to reproduce the drawings with a vehicle. The snag is, a vehicle cannot be lifted off the ground as easily as a pencil can be lifted off the paper. So inevitably a vehicle would leave a track to the drawing before starting to draw it, and a track from the drawing when it had finished, both part of the same continuous line.
Now, take a deep breath because this is the crux of the matter This is exactly what is found on many of the drawings on the plains of Nazca. See the arrowed lines on Fig. 2. Why would there be such lines to and from the drawings if they were made manually? They are clearly not part of the drawings. Are they there because the drawings really were made by a vehicle of some sort? Or are the drawings "related to the transcultural and transpersonal human experience of spirit flight/ out-of-body sensations universally obtained in shamanic states of trance/ecstasy"2?
If you find it hard to accept the idea that there might have been machines in South America over a thousand years ago, look more closely at just one more "unarguably actual, physical line" on the plain of Nazca. It can be seen on the aerial photographs on pp.89-90 of Peruanische Erdzeichen, and is reproduced here in Fig. 3. I have not seen this figure illustrated in any other publication, presumably because archaeologists do not recognise what it is. In the text it is described as a "paddle wheel, meaning unknown"5. It is clearly not a paddle wheel, since the uppermost 'paddle' is bigger than the other four, and they don't all face in the same direction circumferentially. Ask any crane driver, freight container handler or army helicopter pilot what it is and they will tell you without hesitation. For those who don't know anyone in these occupations, it's called a fling - a steel ring attached to which are wire ropes or chains with hooks in the ends. Heavy objects are often fitted with lugs at the top corners so they can be lifted with a fling just like this.
References
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