Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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Maria Reiche was born May 15, 1903 in Dresden. She studied mathematics, astronomy, geography and foreign languages at the Dresden Technical University.

In 1932 she began work as a nanny and teacher for the children of a German consul in Cuzco, Peru. In 1934 she lost one of her fingers to gangrene.

 

 

The same year she became a teacher in Lima and made scientific translations, as she spoke five languages. When World War II broke out, German citizens were detained in Peru.

 

In 1940 Reiche became an assistant to the American Paul Kosok, an historian from Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. Making field studies from 1939–1941 and 1948–49, he is credited as the first Westerner of European descent to seriously investigate the Nazca Lines. He originally studied them in connection with field work on ancient irrigation systems, but quickly concluded they had another purpose.

 

He noticed lines that converged at the point of the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere in June 1941. Together they began to map and assess the lines for their relation to astronomical events.

 

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Later Reiche found lines converging at the summer solstice.

 

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“I know two lines that are 9 kilometers in length and absolutely straight. This fact of straightness may be explained by the extraordinary eyesight of the ancient people of Peru. There are only two places in the world where we have this kind of telescopic eyesight, where people can see small things at immense distances, the one is in Mongolia in the Gobi Desert, and the other is here among these people.”

 

 

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Around 1946 Reiche began to map the figures represented by the Nazca Lines and found 18 different kinds of animals and birds.

 

 

 

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

 

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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.

 

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

 

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“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.”

 

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

 

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

 

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