Ever heard of "Nazca Lines"? How'd they do it!

[ski]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines

This is a satellite/birds eye photo:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/71/Nazca-lineas-perro-c01v2.jpg/320px-Nazca-lineas-perro-c01v2.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Nazca_monkey.jpg

How did this ancient culture make these "drawings" without having the technology to oversee the layout? My friend asked me about this, and it's interesting to think about. What do you think?

[InfiniteNothing]

Paint by numbers?

[molecularfire]

I don't know how they do it but one way I can imagine doing it is drawing something smaller, then gridding it out and then drawing each grid one by one and assuming the picture would turn out similiar to the original.

[DarkFury]

The aliens did it with their super laser after they drew it out on their alien "etch-a-sketch" pad. :D

[MikeD]

Yup...I'm thinking aliens.

[Markel]

Yup...I'm thinking aliens.
or "alien scarecrows" (scarealiens?). :D

[oblongmelon]

well it was definately made by someone of higher intelligence that's for sure...

[Grafalgar]

I don't think people give the civilizations going back a few thousands years enough credit. Wiki claimed that the lines were made from about 200BC. People were warring with each other, throwing spears and slicing one another with swords and other things. They built castles, roads, etc.

Making gigantic pictures without an eye-in-the-sky not impossible without a little creativity :)

Instead of trying to figure out how they did it, how would you guys do it if I gave you all a big ol' pile of rocks and allowed no technology other than perhaps a wheelbarrow to cart rocks around? :) Could probably come up with a number of ways if you were given that task =)

[avlena]

these sound very similar to intaglios, which are pretty much the same thing, but located in So-Cal in my former hometown. linky (http://www.jqjacobs.net/southwest/blythe.html)

[Napoleon54]

I don't think people give the civilizations going back a few thousands years enough credit. Wiki claimed that the lines were made from about 200BC. People were warring with each other, throwing spears and slicing one another with swords and other things. They built castles, roads, etc.

Making gigantic pictures without an eye-in-the-sky not impossible without a little creativity :)

Instead of trying to figure out how they did it, how would you guys do it if I gave you all a big ol' pile of rocks and allowed no technology other than perhaps a wheelbarrow to cart rocks around? :) Could probably come up with a number of ways if you were given that task =)

:stupid:

Just 'cause nowadays WE would do it a lot differently doesn't mean the ancients weren't clever enough to find a way to do it. How is an interesting question and I'm sure there are ways of doing it.

To me though, the even more interesting question is WHY. Why would they go through that much effort to construct something that none of them would be able to see?

BTW, anyone know the scale of these things?

Edit: The Wikpedia article mentions the size.

the largest figures can be nearly 900 feet (270 meters) long.

[cruelpupet]

:stupid:

Just 'cause nowadays WE would do it a lot differently doesn't mean the ancients weren't clever enough to find a way to do it.


Its not even that they do it differently, I would say that the ancients were smarter then us. Ideas and methods were lost over time, and even now we have a hard time figuring out how they accomplished certain feats.

The damascas (sp?) blade for example has been found to contain carbon nanotubes which is what gave it its strength. We are only recently achieving what people achieve thousands of years ago.

The pyramids...not only were the blocks cut uniformly, but recently there have been suggestions on how to build them that didnt require hundreds of thousands of people to do it.

The Antikythera mechanism also points to our ancestors being extremely intelligent. Besides the feat of figuring out the sun was in fact the center of the galaxy, depending on the date entered it gives exact positions for the moon, sun, and other known planets. They had working gears! 30 of them! All precisely cut and man made!

[johnnymk]

I don't think people give the civilizations going back a few thousands years enough credit.

:stupid:

We are so incredibly vain to think that we are the smartest generation ever and that civilizations before us were dummies.

[redcolours]

this got me thinking, how we have no trace of ancient civilizations except for things that are, well, BIG (nazca lines, mayan, incan, and egyptian pyramids, stonehenge, the underwater pyramids in japan, etc).

no written records in something permanent and lasting that would indicate to us future generations what they were about.

our history is loosely based upon the writings and written records of people that handed them down to each succeeding generations. If it wasnt written, they became the stuff of legends and myths and stories.

im thinking ancient civilations devised ways to communicate with each other without the use of recording devices. In the end when they left, or when some catastrophic event wiped them off the face of the earth (or some warring tribe decided to play scorch earth on them), all their culture their ways, their means of creating these things left behind was simply erased with them.

and then think of what we our current generation have in front of us NOW: an electronic device where we write in PIXELS, and bits and bytes. When electricity goes out, we have nothing left of what was written. When the hard drive crashes, all data is lost. Say a very strong magnet wipes out all those data too, then we will have nothing left.

im thinking say, we get a catastrophe where we cant produce electricity anymore, all these things are GONE. we go back to handwriting on paper with ink from whereever we can get natural dye from.

wouldnt it be funny that there would be a BIG gap in history where there is NO known record of what or who we are? itll be known as "the internet void".

and people thousands maybe even tens of thousands of years from now will see what we have built, and know nothing about how it was done, simply because there were no records at all. They'll think those that existed in these days are cave-dwellers and wonder how we were able to achieve all this with "very simple tools". We couldnt have possibly have done any of these things, not with the "level of technology we possess at this time", maybe some alien race came and built them, or even handed them down to us.

maybe those people tens of thousands of years ago had devices similar to computers these days, devices that did not rely on anything physically written to make their plans and their points across.

you know, im just saying....

[Houdini]

I've pondered the same things. There will be a time in someone's history book that mentions a bunch of people typing on little gadgets that sent signals around the world to communicate. And with digital recording and such, we even often lose hard copies of pictures, speeches, etc.

As far as the lines, the last I heard they were constructed pretty much how MF described. As for why, who knows?

I've never been there, but friends have told me how disappointing it is to see the pyramids in Egypt. Evidently they're tiny, and right on the outskirts of Cairo. A big letdown.

But building big stuff a long time ago is an interesting field of study. Even St. Peter's would have been very, VERY difficult to build if Michelangelo hadn't figured out a way to build spiral staircases for horses to climb.