The Mystery of the Nasca Lines

This is the only fully illustrated account of the 45 years Maria Reiche has devoted to unravelling the mystery of the Nasca Lines.In 1940 Reiche became an assistant to the American Paul Kosok, an historian from Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. Making field studies from 1939-1941 and 1948-49, he is credited as the first Westerner of European descent to seriously investigate the Nazca Lines. He originally studied them in connection with field work on ancient irrigation systems, but quickly concluded they had another purpose. He noticed lines that converged at the point of the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere in June 1941. Together they began to map and assess the lines for their relation to astronomical events. Later Reiche found lines converging at the summer solstice. Around 1946 Reiche began to map the figures represented by the Nazca Lines and found 18 different kinds of animals and birds. After Kosok left in 1948, she continued the work and mapped the area. Sh