Maria Reiche: protecting lines to the past: this remarkable woman has inspired a new generation with her passion for preserving the Nasca Lines.

• Author: Malatesta, Parisina

This remarkable woman has inspired a new generation with her passion for preserving the Nasca Lines

A slow overflight of the desert flatland along the southern part of the Peruvian coast reveals the largest concentration of geoglyphs in the world--the Nasca Lines, one of the most compelling revelations of the ideas and cultural expression of man in the Americas. One after another, enormous geometric designs and the outlines of animals, men, and plants, as well as other, still unidentified, pictographs pass below on the Nazca pampas, a hallucinatory landscape that has survived for more than two thousand years. There are over thirteen thousand lines, drawn as if on a blackboard, covering an area of about two hundred square miles and reflecting a cosmogonic reality we can scarcely imagine.

The spiritual universe of the Nasca, which has raised so many questions and is still perceived by many as a mystery, is only underscored by the solitary horizons of the pampas, flanked by bare and rocky silent hills and dominated by the blinding colors of the setting sun.

Yet this hostile environment brought forth a complex, labor-intensive, and durable culture--evident not only in the lines themselves, but in the Nasca's funereal pottery, considered the most brilliant and highly perfected in the Americas. Artifacts have been well preserved by the dry atmosphere, their luminous color and finishes contrasting with the hypnotic desert tones. And, despite the many hypotheses and persistent questions regarding the lines, much of their history can be read in the ancient pottery, weavings, gold pieces, and fountains, or puquios.

Water and fertility were vital to the Nasca and led them to build stone aqueducts. A system of underground canals carried water for many miles below the earth, surfacing in a number of handsomely designed fountains in the shape of downward spirals-an extraordinary task of hydraulic engineering that is still in use today.

It was not until this century, however, that the Nasca's lines drawn in the sand were actually discovered. When Peruvian archaeologist Mejia Xesspe first saw the lines in 1927--after finding them almost by accident since they are practically invisible at the surface--he assumed that they were "sacred pathways." In 1941 American historian Paul Kosok became the first scholar to explore the lines in depth. Thanks to his research, and that of a remarkable woman he introduced to Nazca the following year, new hypotheses soon...