Perspectives in the Pampa: ancient american huge ground drawings in Peru's desert

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Maria Reiche – a life for the geoglyphs
Maria Reiche, born in Dresden, Germany in 1903, emigrated to Peru in 1932 in order to get a job as a private tutoress. When the American Paul Kosok asked her to help him with the registration and interpretation of the just newly discovered geoglyphs she was all for it at once.
1946 she moved finally near Nazca and spent the rest of her life explo-ring the ground drawings. She lived in a small hut at the edge of the Pampa, cleared unnumerous miles of lines from inblown sand, mapped the ground drawings, published them and fought for their preservation – sometimes without success. Anyway, she could prevent a huge irrigation project and achieved that the area became world cultural heritage since 1994. Pretty fit up to an old age, she died in 1998.
A senescent Maria Reiche infirm on the way at the edge of a huge trapezoid. Finally, she had to use a wheel chair.
Maria Reiche at measuring works in the pampa (left and right) and with Paul Kosok (2. from right) and at one of the Nazca lines. In the mid a photo of a crucial experience of Kosok and Reiche: winter solstice exactly in the direction of one of the lines. Since then she favoured astronomical interpretations, but never comitted herself wholly.
Maria Reiche with scetches of the geoglyphs
Stamp and newspaper report from 1955 about the "profesora"
For the locals, Maria Reiche was the woman sweeping the desert (whereby she also destroyed traces unintentionally).
Maria explains the aerial views to the Peru army pilots.
Maria Reiche had a very wantless life in a shed at the edge of the desert (reconstructed in the Maria Reiche Museum near Nazca). Even her appearance got more and more ascetical.
fotos-peru.de
caretas.comp.pe
after Ana Maria Cogorno
picasawec.google.com / Brandy
all photos of this row: nazcamystery.com
nazcamystery.com
fembio.org
students.sbc.edu
girafamania.com.br

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