One of the byway South American civilizations created these mysterious pictures about 2,000 years ago. On the amplitudes of the Naska, a Peruvian desert, these lines drawn over the red docks of the desert depict over 100 known plants and animals, geometrical figures, as well as a lot of unknown separate straight lines. There are a plenty of theories available which try to explain the sense of the drawing and the reason why these pictures had been drawn at all. But nobody has known so far their real destination.

The world’s largest work of the graphical art cover an area of 530 sq. m in Peru. A brief allusion of the Naska’s lines was met in manuscripts of Spanish researchers lived in the 15-17^th centuries, but these lines generally remained unknown for ordinary people until the 1920s. Nevertheless, the Naska’s lines didn’t become a subject of serious scientific study until 1941 when Dr. Paul Kosok, an American archeologist of Long Island University, left to the Naska desert. Later, Dr. Maria Reiher, a German mathematician and astronomer, had dedicated 40 years to systematization and description of these drawings and efforts to explain them.

All the pictures in the desert were made in a one way: an outer layer of a reddish rock was scratched with a continuos line, with a depth down to an occurrence of a light yellow deposit laid below the reddish rock. These line are very likely to have been drawn manually. The themes of the pictures can be classified in two categories: figures and lines. The lines are parallel, similar to tram railways, or form geometrical figures. Since in many areas the lines were scratched over the pictures, it’s obviously, that the pictures had been drawn first. The pictures are a depiction of leaves and branches of different plants, figures of animals and birds and some unknown beings, for instance, a man with a head of an owl or of a bird with an unbelievable snake-like neck. Lines are very straight that put forward an idea that poles, laid eye-based, were used to draw the lines. Even if the hypothesis is right, it’s still a mystery how could drawers exactly follow the idea and produce significantly straight lines over long distances.

The pictures in the Naska desert are dated as of 500 year B.C. to 500 year of the Common Era. The pictures are likely to have been drawn by the Indians inhabited Peru before the Inca empire foundation. They were agriculturists and cultivated fecund plains stretched along the Pacific Ocean coast of Peru. The Indians had left no evidence confirming that they had a written language: all available information of these inhabitants was obtained owing to investigation of burials in the Naska and finding the goods the Indians had made.

These disrupted data on the Indian culture don’t explain why they so doggedly had been drawing the desert. According to one hypothesis, the lines were ancient ways; this is very unlikely, since many of them are unexpectedly terminated at hilltops. The hypothesis elaborated by Dr. Paul Kosok is most popular. Dr. Paul Kosok considered that all these figures and lines presented the “largest astronomic book of the world”. Dr. Maria Reiher shares this point of view. She supposed that these pictures showed location of stars and constellations in different periods of a year and were used by Indians to determine an exact time for ploughing, planting and other vital operation of the arable farming cycle. Beaks of birds in some pictures point to the sunrise point and a solstice day.

The fact that the lines can clearly be seen only from the air gave life to a new theory. According to it, the Naska Indians could fly or hover over the earth, at least. Yet this fantastic idea isn’t so unbelievable (scientists have met something looked like a balloon or a kite on the found earthenware), it doesn’t explain why the Naska Indians needed this pictures and lines. Latest researches carried out at the University of Massachusetts seem to help in resolving the mystery. A group of researchers under the leadership of Mr. Steven B. Mabi, a hydrogeologist, and Mr. Donald Prolks, an archeologist, puts forward an idea that some of the mysterious lines may point out to underground water sources. Independent scientist Mr. David Johns, a researcher of the UMASS anthropology department, and postgraduates Jenny Levines and Gregory Smith, also participate in the work. They think that ancient inhabitants of the Naska are likely to have marked a location of a ground water distribution system, since the system was a more reliable source of drinking and watering water than rivers. Spatial coincidence of the lines with ground water flows allows to give an intrigue explanation of destination of some lines.

Scientists had long ago noticed that animals, plants and people drawn on the earthenware reminded that were drawn on the land. The pictures would show nature-gods (the sky, the earth, and water) the Indians needed to calm down their gods to receive much water and produce a good crop.

The team studied the pictures and underwater flow schemes during their three separate trips to Peru over the last 5 years. The University of Massachusetts and the National Geographic Society sponsored the research.

So far, the results of the research have shown that underground waters were a source of a reliable and uninterrupted water supply to the Naska inhabitants. This water, as compared with a river water, had a better quality by a pH level and a content of magnesium, calcium, chlorine, and sulphate. Geological and archeological review of over 128 places of drain systems has been prepared. New discoveries allowed to come closer to a resolution of another mystery - plenty of archeological findings were found near underground river flows which the Naska’s Indians used as a secondary water source.

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