Nazca culture
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The Nazca culture represents a lost indigenous culture in Peru . This culture is named after the southern Peruvian city of Nazca (also Nasca).
The culture had its centers in the river oases of the Río Gránde in the coastal desert on the Pacific. It developed between 200 BC. BC and AD 600 under extreme climatic conditions: In one of the driest regions on earth, no rain often falls for decades. In winter, on the other hand, the ocean fog banks expand inland and provide so much moisture that even plants develop.
The Nazca culture was significantly influenced by the previous Paracas culture . In the late phase of the Nazca culture (7th and 8th centuries) there are dominant influences from the Wari culture .
The Nazca settlements consisted of light wood and reed structures. More massive structures made of dried clay reed bricks ( adobe ) were found almost exclusively in the submerged city of Cahuáchi in the Nazca Valley .
The people of Nazca were not a centrally administered empire, but consisted of several small tribes. They operated agriculture and irrigated their fields on an artificial underground duct system. They planted beans , potatoes , pumpkins , cassava , avocados , peanuts and chilli to supply them . Cotton , reeds and rushes provided the basic material for everyday life. They already used nets for fishing and also hunted seals . The Nazca knew a thing or two about weaving and made thin-walled ceramics, which they decorated with bright colors with scenes from everyday life.
An elongated head shape (long skull) was regarded by the Nazca as an ideal of beauty. Boards were already tied to the forehead of the babies in order to deform the skull as they grew . Trepanations were also known . Many of those operated on survived the operation for a relatively long time. The dead were wrapped in magnificent cloths and buried in a sitting position in the dry desert soil . The extreme drought mummified the dead. Some of them are still well preserved today. Looters destroyed many of these graves.
On the plateau between the Pacific and the Andes , the Nazca created huge figures, the Nazca Lines (also Nasca Lines), which they scraped into the rubble desert (so-called scratch images).
literature
- Alfred Kroeber : The Archeology and Pottery of Nazca . (Expedition in Peru 1926) AltaMira Press, 1999, ISBN 0-7619-8964-1 .
- Anthony F. Aveni: Between the Lines: The Mystery of the Giant Ground Drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru. University of Texas Press, Austin 2000.
- Viola Zetzsche: remote controlled archeology. In: Adventure Archeology 4/2005, pp. 14–19 ( PDF download ).
- Donald A. Proulx: Paracas and Nasca regional cultures on the south coast of Peru. In: Helaine Silverman et al.: Handbook of South American archeology. Springer, New York 2008, ISBN 978-0-387-74906-8 , pp. 563-585.
- Rosa Lasaponara, Nicola Masini, Giuseppe Orefici. The Ancient Nasca World New Insights from Science and Archeology . Springer International Publishing, 2016
