Page 46 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

and daunting plains look like a very promising canvas, with 200 square
miles of uninterrupted tableland and the certainty that your masterwork
won’t be carried away on the desert breeze or covered by drifting sand.
It’s true that high winds do blow here, but by a happy accident of
physics they are robbed of their sting at ground level: the pebbles that
litter the pampa absorb and retain the sun’s heat, throwing up a
protective force-field of warm air. In addition, the soil contains enough
gypsum to glue small stones to the subsurface, an adhesive regularly
renewed by the moistening effect of early morning dews. Once things are
drawn here, therefore, they tend to stay drawn. There’s hardly any rain;
indeed, with less than half an hour of miserly drizzle every decade, Nazca
is among the driest places on earth.
If you are an artist, therefore, if you have something grand and
important to express, and if you want it to be visible for ever, these
strange and lonely flatlands could look like the answer to your prayers.
Experts have pronounced upon the antiquity of Nazca, basing their
opinions on fragments of pottery found embedded in the lines and on
radiocarbon results from various organic remains unearthed here. The
dates conjectured range between 350 BC and AD 600. Realistically, they
2
tell us nothing about the age of the lines themselves, which are
inherently as undatable as the stones cleared to make them. All we can
say for sure is that the most recent are at least 1400 years old, but it is
theoretically possible that they could be far more ancient than that—for
the simple reason that the artefacts from which such dates are derived
could have been brought to Nazca by later peoples.

2 Pathways to the Gods, p. 21.

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