Flex Mentallo

They are mainly based on the cultures of Ancient Peru, stretching back to the sacred City of Caral, which was undiscovered until 1948, it's significance further ignored because the site did not yield many typical artifacts that were sought at archeological sites throughout the Andes at the time.

The Andean civilizations made up a loose patchwork of different cultures that developed from the highlands of Colombia to the Atacama Desert.

Secrets of the Inca "I was born as a lily in the garden, and like the lily I grew, as my age advanced I became old and had to die, and so I withered and died." Pachacuti

Many thanks guys! Happy Easter everyone!

Next: Heaven's River

Bound up in her own theories, Maria Reich had never though to ask them.

He theorized that the lines and figures were part of religious practices involving the worship of deities associated with the availability of water, which directly related to the success and productivity of crops. He interpreted the lines as sacred paths leading to places where these deities could be worshiped. The figures were symbols representing animals and objects meant to invoke the gods' aid in supplying water. In support of this, Aveni thought the lines were the pathways for important ceremonial processions. This was later confirmed by local people native to the town of Nazca, who when asked, offered to demonstrate the procession, in which hundreds of people literally walked the lines.

But Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni, experts in archaeoastronomy, concluded in 1990 that there was insufficient evidence to support such an astronomical explanation. In addition to which, in 1985, the archaeologist Johan Reinhard had published archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrating that worship of mountains and other water sources predominated in Nazca religion and economy from ancient to recent times.

“Everything had prepared me for this life. The isolation into which I found myself, my parents putting me aside after my brother was born, my shortsightedness not being detected, all made me an introvert. It made me aloof because I was never the popular type. Now the tourists have made me popular. I was never popular! I sometimes wanted to be, but I could never be. What compelled me on this quest was my curiosity. I wanted to know!"

Bizarrely, Vogue Paris even based a fashion photoshoot on her legend, featuring look a like super model Erin Wasson...

The scholar's tireless work promoting the pre-Columbian drawings persuaded UNESCO to declare the 200 square mile area a world heritage site in 1995. In addition to honors at her funeral, Reiche's former home has been adapted as a museum. The Maria Reiche Centre in Nazca provides information about her life and work. The centre sponsors lectures on the Nazca Lines, a scale model, current research, and different theories about their origin and construction. In Peru, about 50 schools, foundation and associations are named after her.

Undaunted, she used the profits from the book to campaign for preservation of the Nazca desert and to hire guards for the property and assistants for her work. Reiche became a legend in Peru for her almost single-handed battle to preserve the Nazca lines. For years before the lines became a UNESCO World Heritage site, Reiche guarded them so zealously that even after she was confined to a wheelchair she was known to chase trespassers off the sand dunes near the lines.

Reiche published her theories in the book The Mystery on the Desert (1949, reprint 1968). Reiche stated her theories that the builders of the lines used them as a sun calendar and an observatory for astronomical cycles. But the book had a mixed response from scholars.

“The number of drawings on the Pampa is immense. There are thousands of straight lines, hundreds of triangles and quadrangles, and dozens of figures. All this spread over 50 kilometers from north to south, and 5 to 7 kilometers from the foot of the Andes toward the sea. The biggest concentration of drawings is always found at the edges of the different plains where the descent to the valleys begin because this is the nearest place to where the people who made the drawings lived though they never lived among the drawings, nor buried their dead there. On the other hand there are some very isolated drawings in the midst of the desert. Others are on high mountain tops or behind mountain ridges where the people who drew them had to travel for hours to get there. This is very strange and inexplicable.”

Because the lines can be best seen from above, she persuaded the Peruvian Air Force to help her make aerial photographic surveys.

She used her background as a mathematician to analyze how the Nazca may have created such huge-scale figures and found them to have a mathematical precision that was highly sophisticated.

After Kosok left in 1948, she continued the work and mapped the area.