By Julia Talarn Rabascall SANTIAGO – Hillsides in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert hold one of humanity’s great mysteries: abstract figures and disturbing human silhouettes etched onto the land that are the keys to a world yet to be discovered. Extraterrestrial codes and glyphs drawn by ancient Phoenician travelers are some of the many hypotheses made about the more than 500 figures found there, myths that could be dismissed once and for all by Chilean archaeologist Gonzalo Pimentel, who has spent years studying these strange formations. Far from being the work of Martians, these amazing feats are “a kind of rock painting related to the ancient caravan routes where travelers left an imprint of their presence and their identity,” the expert in geoglyphs and pre-Columbian Andean migrations told Efe. The figures, mostly created in the first millennium A.D., measure between 10 and 300 meters (33 and 980 feet) and are found in some 500 places between the cities of Antofagasta and Arica, in the middle of the Atacama Desert. No, they were not created by Martians or by members of the ancient Phoenician civilization – who according to some theories would have left the Middle East to settle in the Atacama Desert more than 3,000 years ago. “The figures,” the expert said, “are the work of the pre-Columbian world, of local ancestors who, in their wish to domesticate the desert, to endow it with content and culture, painted the hillsides with enormous figures, as if they wanted to compete with the infinite desert.” Pimentel stressed the importance of these figures for understanding pre-Columbian cultures: “They represent the social and cultural diversity of groups of humans including the Atacamans, Aimaras and some Quechua groups.” The most paradigmatic case is that of a complex abstract figure, orthogonal in form, that measures 300 meters (980 feet) long by 80 meters (260 feet) wide, created between the years 900 A.D. and 1550 A.D., which is observable in its entirety from the air. But when these figures were created, mankind was not able to fly – so why were these drawings made that can only be perfectly seen from the air? As occurred with the legendary lines of Nazca in southern Peru, the key to this ancient world lies beneath the sands of the vast Chilean desert as imprints of a civilization yet to be revealed.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 13:00:41 +0000
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