Frost soon found an answer: the Chinese. Not the early Chinese, however, but immigrants from the Pearl River delta who had settled in California in the nineteenth century and had started a flourishing fishing industry. They had brought with them the technology of their native land, and sailed the California coast in traditional junks and sampans.
To moor their vessels, they probably used the same kind of anchors as their forefathers – stones with holes bored in them. ‘It is hard to resist the working hypothesis that the Palos Verdes stones represent evidence of nineteenth-century California Chinese fishermen who made frequent visits to a reef rich in marine life,’ wrote Frost. He added: There is no other human agency in the history of the California coast that had both a need for implements made of local stone and the means to get them where they are found today.’
Professor Frost’s arguments are rational and convincing, but can they be said to solve the ‘Chinese anchor mystery’ once and for all? There can, of course, be no definitive answer. The methods of the Chinese fishermen of California died with them and, as Professor Frost observes, ‘unfortunately, a hundred years ago other Californians were more interested in driving the Chinese fishermen out of business than in studying their technology’. There is still a remote possibility that Chinese mariners did visit America before Columbus and fashioned anchors out of local stone, but if a mystery can be explained simply, it is perverse to settle for any more outlandish solution.
The Nazca Lines
The Nazca lines of Peru offer a more profound challenge to archaeologists, but recent research in laboratory and desert has brought a new understanding of their purpose. Theories that the lines were runways for alien spacecraft or tracks laid out for pre-Columbian athletics meetings have long been laughed out of court.
Anthony F. Aveni, Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University in the United States, led a team which began an elaborate survey of the lines in 1977. Earlier, he and a colleague had studied the extraordinary ceque system of the Inca capital, Cuzco. This was a network of forty-one ‘invisible lines’ radiating out of the city. Each was punctuated at intervals by a huaca, or sacred place. Unlike the lines, these huacas actually existed, and the investigators found that many of those at the end of the ceques marked places near which water could be found. The system also operated as a gigantic agricultural calendar: each huaca signified a different day in the farmer’s year, and some ceques pinpointed where the sun would be on important dates, thus signifying when, for example, the crops should be sown. The ceques were also used as ritual paths by pilgrims.
The Nazca lines were probably laid out 1,000 years before Cuzco was built. Were they, Aveni wondered, forerunners of the ceque system? To find out, six expeditions laboured under the desert sun; volunteers followed the lines for miles across the pampa; aerial photographers produced a photo-mosaic; and the triangles, trapezoids and spirals were meticulously measured. The results were fascinating. Like the spokes of a vast wheel, many lines radiated from centres, each of which took the form of a natural hill or a mound on which a rock cairn had been constructed. These centres reminded the investigators of the huacas of Cuzco.
Many of the Nazca lines, like their invisible counterparts at Cuzco, turned out to be associated with water. Some opened up into vast trapezoids, two thirds of which were aligned with water courses with their ‘thin ends’ pointing upstream. The astronomical studies added extra weight to the theory. The lines that intersected the part of the horizon through which the sun travelled in the course of the year tended to cluster around one particular area – the region where the sun appears in late October, a time especially important to the Nazca farmers, for this is when the dried-up rivers flow again with water. This suggests that the Nazca lines, like the ceque system, formed a giant agricultural calendar.
The survey also revealed that the lines had been used as pathways and established that they have many of the characteristics of the old Inca roads. Aveni speculated that workers might have used them to travel from one river valley to another and that the paths might have had some sort of ritual use.
This is how Professor Aveni summed up his findings:
To be sure, our argument has proceeded by analogy, but whatever the final answer may be to the mystery of the Nazca lines, this much is certain: the pampa is not a confused and meaningless maze of lines, and it was no more intended to be viewed from the air than an Iowa wheatfield. The lines and line centers give evidence of a great deal of order, and the well-entrenched concept of radiality offers affinities between the ceque system of Cuzco and the lines on the pampa. All the clues point to a ritual scheme involving water, irrigation and planting; but as we might expect of these ancient cultures, elements of astronomy and calendar were also evident.
Although the question of why the lines were built is the major mystery of Nazca, there is another intriguing enigma still to be resolved: How did the Indians of at least 1,000 years ago draw the birds, insects, and animals that make up the huge ‘picture book’ of Nazca? The outlines are difficult to make out on the desert floor, yet from the air their precision is flawless.
In August 1982, a small group of enthusiasts assembled at a location far to the north of the ‘giant scratchpad’, a landfill site near West Liberty, Kentucky. Joe Nickell of the University of Kentucky, an experienced investigator of mysteries, planned to work out how the vast drawings of birds, insects and animals that probably predate the larger Nazca lines were actually inscribed onto the desert. Maria Reiche, the stalwart investigator whose study of Nazca began in the 1940s, had noticed an important clue in the course of her painstaking mapping. The draughtsmen of ancient times had made small-scale preliminary drawings of the figures on plots 6 ft (2 m) square. They had then enlarged them, section by section. There can be no doubt that this was the method used: like the lines and figures, these sketches have survived the centuries and can still be seen.
Maria Reiche was less specific about how the drawings were scaled up, however. She suggested that the Nazca Indians could have used a rope and stakes to make straight lines and circles, but was vague about how they could have found the right positions for the stakes that served as the centres of circles or the ends of straight lines. Joe Nickell thought he might have the answer, and called in two of his cousins to put his theory to the test. They decided to try to reproduce one of the most striking of the Nazca drawings, the giant 440-ft (135-m)-long condor. Nickell wrote afterwards:
The method we chose was quite simple. We would establish a center line and locate points on the drawing by plotting their coordinates. That is, on the small drawing we would measure along the center line from one end (the bird’s beak) to a point on the line directly opposite the point to be plotted (say a wing tip). Then we would measure the distance from the center line to the desired point. A given number of units on the small drawing would require the same number of units – larger units – on the large drawing.
Maria Reiche had suggested that the desert artists had used a standard unit of measurement known as the ‘Nazca foot’ – about 32 cm (12.68 in) long. So, using the ‘Nazca foot’, a wooden T-square to ensure each measurement they made would be at right angles to the centre line, a supply of tennis-court marker-lime for drawing the outline, and with an aeroplane standing by for aerial photography, Nickell and his group (which now included his father) set to work. The task took nine laborious hours of plotting and pegging. Over a mile of string connected the stakes, but the outline was unmistakable. After a week’s delay, due to rain, they traced it out with lime, and the figure, ‘possibly the world’s largest art reproduction’, could be photographed in all its glory from the air.
Cheerfully, Nickell summed up. They had proved that:
the drawings could have been produced by a simple method requiring only materials available to South American Indians centuries ago. The Nazcas probably used a simplified form of this method, with perhaps a significant amount of the work being done freehand. There is no evidence that extra-terrestrials were involved; but, if they were, one can only conclude that they seem to have used sticks and cord just as the Indians did.
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[See First Set Of Plates pl01 to pl26]
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The Peruvian Stone Walls