Nazca Lines

Lee Berman · 24 Jul 2010, 03:51 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:51:22 -0400
Subject: (urth) Nazca Lines
Message-ID: <SNT123-W3780DEFF6336DFC9AE2CDBCFA40 at phx.gbl>

I was just watching a National Geographic special on the mystery
of the gigantic, many kilometers-long Nazca desert drawings in 
southern Peru. I thought about the Sun series, mostly because they did a 
lot of re-enactment with local, native actors and it made me think of 
Apu-Punchau, as this is pretty much his territory.

The general anthropological conclusion is that these people resorted 
to massive head-chopping sacrifices and probably ever increased-sized line
drawings to influence the weather. The area spent several hundred
years as a rather verdant, well-watered place allowing a thriving 
culture to establish itself.  Then the desert started relentlessly asserting
itself. They tried in vain to placate the gods with more intense religious 
expressions each year as they realized the previous year's head chop 
sacrifices and line drawing were not sufficient to please the deities.

The research conclusions are too recent to have influenced Wolfe to create
Urth with its dying sun or The Whorl and its progressive drought. But
perhaps the South American native propensity for head chopping had an impact
on him. 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Hotmail is redefining busy with tools for the New Busy. Get more from your inbox.
http://www.windowslive.com/campaign/thenewbusy?ocid=PID28326::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WM_HMP:042010_2

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net