- NAZCA, Peru (AP) -- American tourists drove their van across this desert
plain in southern Peru, their tire tracks scarring the fragile, ancient
designs etched into the moonlike landscape. Their marks will remain for
centuries.
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- Tourists are not the only threat to the
Nazca Lines. Trucks rumble across them. At night, looters dig in search
of Indian graves, miners look for gold and city trucks dump garbage on
the desert.
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- With the recent death of the woman who
defended the Nazca Lines for 50 years, archaeologists warn the huge desert
etchings could disappear in coming decades.
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- The site is made up of thousands of lines,
some stretching for miles and climbing hills. Dozens of figures are etched
among them: a hummingbird, monkey, whale, spider and flower.
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- The figures, some up to 270 metres long
and recognizable only from the air, are etched into one of the world's
driest deserts, 450 kilometres southeast of Lima.
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- Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Orefici,
who has worked in Nazca for 17 years, calls the desert etchings the world's
largest hieroglyphics, created 1,000 to 2,000 years ago when the Nazca
and Paracas cultures cleared the stony surface and exposed the whitish
soil underneath.
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- The tourists from California who crisscrossed
over the Nazca Lines left July 23 after dumping fruit peel and eggs shells.
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- What they did "was a minor sacrilege
of one of the world's archaeological treasures," Orefici said.
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- "But it was one of many sacrileges.
The Nazca Lines are suffering an absurd neglect."
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- The government has budgeted $10,000 US
to protect the site for the rest of the year.
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- The money pays for two guards on motorcycles
to patrol the 322 square kilometres of desert where the lines are etched.
At night, the guards go home.
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- Centuries of neglect have destroyed about
a fifth of the original etchings, Nazca historian Andres Lancho said.
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- The busy Pan American Highway, built
in the early 1940s, slices hundreds of lines and cuts a drawing of a giant
lizard in two.
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- In May, German mathematician Maria Reiche,
died of cancer at the age of 95. Before her death, Reiche paid for the
guards.
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- For 50 years she fought threats to the
lines, including plans to hold a motorcycle race and to irrigate the desert
for farming.
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- "Her death has put a big question
mark beside the future of the Nazca Lines because who will fight for them
like she did?" Lancho said.
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- The site has baffled archaeologists,
who wonder how ancient cultures constructed such straight lines and precise
figures without modern tools or airplanes.
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- Reiche believed the designs represented
a giant calendar based on the movements of constellations.
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- She theorized the drawings told ancient
desert dwellers when to plant and irrigate their crops and were made using
ropes, stakes and mathematics.
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- In the 1970s, a best-selling book suggested
they were an alien landing strip.
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- Nazca became an attraction for mystics
who believe it holds special magnetic powers. Others came to wait for space
ships to return to earth.
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- Before her death, Reiche called for better
protection for the lines. "This precious thing should be treated like
a very fragile manuscript that is guarded in a special room in a library,"
she said.
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