The Nazca Mega Paintings are a group of huge ground figures located in the Cecula Desert in southern Peru, between the town of Nazca and the city of Palpa, which were created by the Nazca civilization on the desert ground.
hummingbird
spider
The Nazca giant was discovered in 1939 by the American archaeologist Paul Corso. There are hundreds of individual figures, with simple lines, complex arrangements to form fish, spirals, algae, vultures, spiders, flowers, iguanas, herons, hands, trees, hummingbirds, monkeys, cats, etc. Scholars have different interpretations of the purpose of these designs, but in general they are considered religious.
Monkey
hummingbird
These geometric figures are the legacy of the ancient Nazca civilization. The area of nazcatu is extremely large, 30 kilometers long and wide, and the entire area is covered by a huge number of huge drawings, numbering more than a thousand. These drawings are huge, and it's hard to see most of them in their entirety unless you're in the air. One of the great mysteries is why such a huge land painting was painted.
Most of the paintings are huge geometric figures with countless precise straight lines extending to the horizon, which are far larger than the figures of animals. In particular, there are countless elongated trapezoidal or triangular patterns that look like runways and are painted all over the area.
The scale of the main animal paintings on the ground includes a 46-meter-long spider, a 96-meter hummingbird, a 55-meter monkey, a 65-meter whale, a 180-meter hyena and a 135-meter vulture. The largest animal painting is a 285-meter-long bird painting, which is estimated to depict a pelican or heron, or a flamingo.
The longest bird
dog
The "painting" method of the Nazca giant painting is to remove the dark reddish-brown rocks of this basin in a specific area, exposing deeper, unoxidized light-colored rocks. Depending on the scale, they consist of wider and deeper "lines". Presumably, the lines of the land painting were first piled up from the center of the line with dark reddish-brown rocks, sand and gravel, and then in order to make the lines clearer, the small amount of dark reddish-brown sand and gravel that remained in the center of the line was also removed.
Regarding the significance of the land paintings, scientists say that some of these lines correspond to the direction in which the sun sets during the summer and winter solstices. The scientists also performed a computer analysis of the direction of these lines and found that the lines were related to the direction in which the sun and moon moved each year.
This indicates that the Nazca giant paintings are of a calendar nature. It can be inferred that the summer and winter solstices are the beginning of the wet and dry seasons for people in the arid areas of the southern coast, and are naturally closely related to the time of farming and sacrifice.
Some scientists also said that the reason for the creation of Nazca paintings may be that people marched in a single row along the same road to pray for rain. It is possible that Nazca painting was created as part of this route. Bright red sea shell fragments were found on and around the lines of the land paintings. Other archaeological studies have shown that these shells were used in rain-making ceremonies at the time.
Finally, people wonder how these huge paintings were created. Theoretically, the method of drawing various shapes on a large scale is the "enlargement method", that is, drawing a large enough original map, taking a suitable center point, and then starting from this point, each point of the original map is scaled up radially. Of course, this is just a guess. The real method of painting is still unknown.