The Nazca were a small, independent society that flourished between 100 B.C.E. and 700 C.E. The Nazca people worked as farmers, skilled potters, and basket makers, and as a group they made significant advances in underground irrigation systems. They also made large-scale line drawings in the desert, which have endured into the twenty-first century. Many similar independent communities existed in the Central Andes during the same period as the Nazca, but the Nazca are more famous, mainly because of these amazing drawings. If a modern traveler flies over the arid (dry, with little or no rainfall) southern coastal plains of present-day Peru he or she will see a vast display of straight lines that are miles long, huge geometric shapes, and gigantic animal and plant figures. The drawings are so large that it is difficult to see them from the ground. Why did the Nazca sketch out these enormous pictures in the sand--pictures that they could not easily view themselves? This question has puzzled all kinds of investigators. Some of them offer scholarly theories to explain the drawings; others have come up with alternative explanations involving extraterrestrial beings and the supernatural.

The story of the Nazca people revolves around the geography and water sources in the area where they lived, one of the driest places on the planet. The southern rivers of Peru are smaller than those in the north and tend not to stretch all the way from their mountain sources to the sea; hills block their path to the Pacific Ocean. The Nazca Valley is the inland meeting point of several such rivers. In the lower valley, the Rio Grande de Nazca and some of the other rivers actually run underground in certain places, avoiding the hot sun of the desert plains, which would otherwise evaporate their waters. The Nazca people adapted to their harsh, dry environment by developing an irrigation system that followed the example of the rivers: They located and tapped into the water table and then directed the water--underground--to the places it was most needed. The Nazca built underground aqueducts, channels that delivered the water to far-off reservoirs and irrigation canals. Some of these channels are as deep as 30 feet (9 meters) underground and measure up to a half-mile long. A few of these aqueducts, called puquios, are still in use in the early twenty-first century.

Even with the Nazca innovations in irrigation, the southern coastal climate was too dry to provide enough food for dense populations. Scholars estimate that the population of the Nazca Valley probably never rose above twenty-two thousand people.

Little is known about the government of the Nazca. The images on Nazca ceramics do not indicate that there was a hierarchy, or classification of the people according to ability or to economic, social, or professional standing within the society. The people who participated in the Nazca culture shared customs, a style of art, and a religion, but they probably lived in fairly small social units that were governed independently.

Like other pre-Columbian groups, the Nazca seem to have based their religion on the forces of the natural world. On their pottery and on the ground of the desert, they drew images that represent the godly forces of rain and climate. According to archaeologist Donald Proulx, as quoted in a 2000 Discover article, these images were "representations of supernatural forces--not deities [gods] in the Western sense but powerful forces of sky and earth and water whom they needed to propitiate [satisfy] for water and a good harvest."

The best-known artifact (any item made or used by humans, such as a tool or weapon, that may be found by archaeologists or others who seek clues to the past) of the Nazca is the amazing system of lines that the Nazca people drew on the coastal plains, or pampa, north of Cahuachi. The drawings extend over an area of about 400 square miles (1,036 square kilometers). The pampa has a fine dark crust that covers much whiter sand below. By brushing away the crust, the Nazca created well-defined lines of pale sand. Because the pampa receives so little rain and is protected from winds by the mountains, the Nazca lines are still there and mostly intact in the early twenty-first century, two thousand years after they were created.

The Nazca lines are called "geoglyphs." They represent a kind of writing or expression drawn directly on the earth's surface. There are about a thousand Nazca geoglyphs in all, including straight lines, odd shapes, and "bioglyphs," or animal and plant images. Some of the perfectly straight lines are 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) long. Viewed together, some of the straight lines form gigantic geometric shapes. There are also unknown symbols and zigzagging lines. Among the bioglyphs are huge birds, spiders, and plants. Most scholars of ancient Andean cultures believe that the animal images were done first, and that the straight lines and geometric shapes were probably created in, or even before, the earliest known Nazca settlements in the area, possibly between 200 and 300 C.E.

The Nazca society had dissolved by about 700 C.E. The demise of the Nazca may have been caused by earlier natural disasters--severe drought followed by flooding brought about by El Nino. El Nino is an occasional phenomenon in which the waters of the Pacific Ocean along the coast of Ecuador and Peru warm up, usually around late December, sometimes bringing about drastic weather changes like flooding or drought. It is also possible that the Nazca were overwhelmed by neighboring peoples. The Wari people were in the process of spreading their empire, and they may have been in some way responsible for the demise of the Nazca. However, there is little evidence to support this.

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