The Nazca lines were only discovered accidentally when a plane flew over the site in the mid
20th century and the surprised pilot suddenly noticed them from the air. From the vantage point
of the sky however, there can be clearly seen the huge shapes of a monkey (fig.10), a
Hummingbird (fig.11) and one that really does look like an astronaut (fig.12). And that’s just a
few. There are many, many more, covering virtually the entire plateau (fig.13).
The enormous size of these pictograms really and truly cannot be understated and it is widely
believed that the design blueprint for the Nasca site could only properly have been realized from
the air. How else would the artist ever know if the design was correct? It also seems strange that
anyone would go to all the trouble of covering a mountain plateau in huge pictograms that no-one
(who couldn’t fly) would ever possibly be able to view in the first place, there is simply no
apparent point to such an exercise.
Fig.13The Ica Stones
Undoubtedly another one of the greatest enigmas of the archeological world surrounds a
collection of some 15,000 artifacts that were found in Peru in 1960. Similar in many ways to the
Nasca lines, I refer to a collection of glyphs carved onto stones that collectively form a veritable
‘rock library’ now known as the Ica Stones. The unusual scenes depicted in detailed carvings on
the stones appear to be from the Pre-Columbian era and the sheer volume of them is astonishing.
But there is also a rather intriguing story that surrounds these enigmatic carved stones.
The stones were supposedly found in a cave by a native farmer at a place called Ica, about 300
klm from Lima. The farmer claimed to have found piles of them in various caves and gorges in
the area, some scattered about the ground and some slightly buried beneath the surface. At first
the farmer had only a few bags of carved stones but then later returned with literally thousands of
the artifacts and for some time made a comfortable living for himself selling the stones to tourists
at a market stall.