Fresh look at mysterious Nasca lines in Peru | Hacker News Reader

Fresh look at mysterious Nasca lines in Peru

global.hokudai.ac.jp

81 pointsconse_lad25 comments

I dont recall where i read it but i found it interesting.

Using walkable paths and chanting while walking to memorize facts/stories. Great for groups of people to share the knowledge of one person with the rest of the group. One chants, the others repeat.

I also personally used this method to learn botanical names of plants. Walking rhythmically through a botanical garden and chanting the names rhythmically as a group was a great way to memorize them.

So each Figure could be a walkable memorizing pathway for future generations?

Thats one interesting theory. Made me think of hedge mazes.

Andro Linklater in Measuring America says this is one of the great tragedies of forcibly relocating Native Americans from their traditional lands: the loss of the oral histories bound to routes and landmarks on those lands. So the theory isn't without some precedents. I'm not sure what evidence he puts forward for this though.

Sounds almost like Songlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline

It would be so cool if the Native Americans independently discovered the Method of Loci (or something similar)! If so, I wonder if they also developed the same rules of thumb as the Greeks/Romans, like: space your loci apart, always view your loci from the same angle, store a fixed number of items at each loci, etc.

I'm aware of one interesting example where someone created a memory palace around an object that's not a building (or a route along a street). IIRC a person became blind and wanted to write a book, so s/he stored plot points at different parts of an intricate vase s/he was familiar with. (In medieval Europe, the fingers of the left hand were also used for memory purposes.)

Using a stylized bird gives you readily apparent loci: the beak, the head, each of the three feathers of each wing, etc.

Magnifying the bird and turning it into a path is clever, since your sense of place, amount of fatigue while walking, and on which side the sun hits you, would all help cement the route in your memory.

Memory Palace, as in used for memorization, is covered in Moonwalking with Einstein (a book). It's certainly an interesting way to memorize things, in this case competitions for memorizing a deck of cards.

I'd you're wondering what a hermit bird looks like:

http://www.peruaves.org/trochilidae/black-throated-hermit-ph...

So that does make sense.

I'm wondering if the drawings on the desert plains could have been some kind of manifestation ritual, i.e. "let's get some beautiful jungle up in here, everybody get drawing." When there aren't any super grounded or practical ideas as to how to do a thing, it seems like this is one of those ideas to which human psychology likes to attach.

My terrible interpretation is that this is a sense of identity or proto-national borders. “This is who we are, our people are spread far, extended to as far away as where this bird lives.” Beyond that it’s all ritual.

If only they had a kangaroo too, the ancient aliens crowd would go nuts. Alas, I guess I’ll have to watch tv, another identity ritual.

... The crop inside the limits of the hummingbird figure is for being offered to the hummingbird good or the hummingbird tribe. This other crop inside pelican bird is for being filled by the coastal villages. This maize inside the sun is for taxes for the solar god and those tomatoes inside the polygon saying netflix are for our targarian lords.

Maybe is just a taxing system. Fill this triangle completely with avocados or I will you next year.

People from Nasca also built a wind-powered aqueduct system.

https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/climate-weather/blogs/myst...

> re-classified a previously identified hummingbird (Geoglyph No. PV68A-CF1) as a hermit

As Hermit here is referred to a type of Hummingbird, re-classified does not look like the right word for this. Would be like saying that a previously identified bovine has been re-classified now as a cow.

My one regret is not visiting these lines while I was in Peru. Due to climate change, there is danger that increased heavy rains in the region may wash the lines away that has persisted for over two thousand years...

I decided to skip them when I was in Peru too. Didn't see how I'd get much more benefit seeing them from several thousand feet in a plane than I would looking at photos of them.

Same can't be said for Machu Picchu, photos really don't do that place justice.

Having done the Cessna tour over the lines back in 1990, I would say it is worth seeing them by air, just to get an idea of the expanse of the lines and how they sit in the landscape.

Top tip - don't have breakfast if you're going on the morning flights. There was quite a lot of vomitting going on around me.

“Several thousand feet” isn’t quite the right way to describe the Nazca tourist flights. “Dozens of feet” hits a little closer. And always at 60 degrees of bank, so that you get a good look.

It’s really cool for a while. But there comes a point where you really wish the guy would stop circling that monkey at four gees, and how about we just stipulate that that next one is a bird, without the death spiral.

It’s the rare experience where you’re happy to have them cut a few minutes off your hour. Definitely give it a go if you’re passing by!

I realize this is proposing that the birds depicted are not endemic to Peru.

However, on the topic of birds endemic to Peru , the Marvelous Spatuletail is just amazing and stunning.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvellous_spatuletail

Oh wow. Seeing one of those in the wild would be pretty life-changing I'll bet.

That's a really cool looking bird.

For a second, I thought you were going to talk about the Rupicola Peruviana:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Rupicola...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbxFGeNzqw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean_cock-of-the-rock

Considering their digit-counting to identify the hermit, I am curious what they think about this one:

https://i.imgur.com/1wvFATq.jpg

I am going to leave it because it's interesting. But think that the above is a photoshop. I didn't notice at first, but since I learned that the lady, Maria Reiche, who was an early champion of the nazca lines, had 9 fingers; having lost one to a cactus. http://enperublog.com/2008/12/01/nine-fingered-destiny-of-ma...

Search for 'nazca lines hands' on Google Images and you'll find dozens of other pictures of this figure...

> I am going to leave it because it's interesting. But think that the above is a photoshop.

Why do you think that?

I assume this is ignoring the ones greenpeace dragged a protest sign through?

No, that one is the main subject of the article. Are you suggesting that any amount of damage invalidates the figures' historical status?

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