Geoglyphs cut into the desert pavement of southern Peru, made between roughly 500 BC and AD 500 by the Nazca and Paracas cultures and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1994. Most are straight lines and trapezoids; a smaller set are animals and plants, including the spider, the hummingbird and the monkey. Maria Reiche surveyed and defended them for half a century. Graham Hancock dismisses the alien-landing-strip reading within the first fifty pages of Fingerprints of the Gods and argues instead that some figures are sky diagrams, following Phyllis Pitluga’s identification of the spider with Orion. Anthony Aveni and others have found no statistical support for astronomical alignment across the lines as a whole. The leading archaeological readings are ritual pathways walked in procession, and a water and fertility cult in one of the driest places on earth. The landing-strip reading Hancock dismisses is Erich von Daniken’s, from Chariots of the Gods? (1968), and it remains the single best known exhibit of the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis.
Connections
Graham Hancock · Tiahuanaco · Orion Correlation Theory · Erich von Daniken · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis