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A Review of Paul Kosok’s Last Book!

In 1939-41 and 1948-49 the historian Paul Kosok made extensive field studies of the prehistoric irrigation works in the oasis valleys of coastal Peru. His aim was to map the ancient canal systems, to reconstruct the maximum areas of pre-Columbian cultivation, and to study the relation of irrigation to settlement patterns. In these investigations he utilized the pioneer aerial photographs of the Shippee-Johnson Expedition (George R. Johnson, Peru from the Air, American Geographical Society, 1930) and, later, the aerial photographs of the U.S. Army and of the Servicio Aerofotográfico in Lima. It was an ambitious undertaking both in terms of the broadly comparative hydraulic context in which Kosok viewed Peruvian irrigation society and in terms of the areal scope, for it covered 22 valleys from the Lurin in the south to the Motupe in the north, a distance of 470 miles. Kosok had the imagination and energy to initiate such a broad-scale project. He failed to achieve his aims possibly because the task was too great for one man, but certainly because he was too unsystematic and because his numerous other interests prevented him from devoting sufficient time to the Peruvian work.

Kosok published two preliminary papers on the results of his Peruvian irrigation studies (“The Role of Irrigation in Ancient Peru, “ Proceedings of the 8^th American Scientific Congress, Vol.2, pp.169-78, Washington; ”El Valle de Lambayeque,” Actas del II Congreso Nacional de Historia del Peru, 1958, pp. 49-67, Lima), but he had published neither his detailed field observations nor his general conclusions at the time of his death in 1959, The present volume, which he had completed and which was partly in proof when he died, was intended as a popular prologue to a projected more serious work. The result is not the definitive monograph on ancient Peruvian irrigation that archaeologists have been waiting for over the years. But it is a handsome and remarkable book which contains previously unpublished site plans (e.g., some drawn By Bandelier) and hundreds of aerial and ground photographs. It is a mine of information both fascinating and useful to archaeologists.

Paul Kosok is credited with being the original serious investigator into the Nazca Lines mystery. His work on the lines started during the 1930's and ended with his death in 1959. He was succeeded by his partner Maria Reiche until her own death in 1998.

Paul Kosok and Maria Reiche advanced one of the earliest reasons given for the Nazca Lines: that they were intended to point to the places on the distant horizon where the Sun and other celestial bodies rose or set.

Maria Reiche and Paul Kosok at work surveying the desert in the late 1940's.  Maria is holding a tupu

María Reiche standing with Paul Kosok,
surveying the Nazca lines.

Paul Kosok on the expedition to Nazca 1939-1941 - in this photo you see the sun setting at winder solstice directly along the "Solstice Line"

The Nazca enigma Immense patterns made of furrows or ditches are etched into the barren Nazca desert almost 500 km southeast of Lima, the capital of Peru. They are so vast that they cannot be seen from ground level, but when viewed from the air they unfold into a fantastic bestiary of semi-naturalistic monkeys, longnecked birds, a spider, a lizard, dogs, fish and whales, surrounded by zigzags, spirals, star-shapes, rectangles and trapezoids. The lines, scored by moving aside lines of rocks to expose the lighter alluvial soil beneath, are named after and widely attributed to the Nazca culture which flourished in the area from around 200 BC to 600 AD.

What was their purpose? Ever since the discovery of the Nazca display over 40 years ago by Dr. Paul Kosok, this has been a perplexing archaeological mystery. Many theories have been put forward, some far-fetched. Did the lines indicate a space-port built by or for extra-terrestrial beings? Did they have a ritual significance, with torchlight processions winding along the pictograms on ritual days? Were they a star map of the ancient heavens, "the world's largest astronomy book," in Dr. Kosok's phrase? Did they contain symbolic information for transmission to later generations? Although many different interpretations have been made of the individual components of the Nazca display, today many scholars agree that it has social, political, economic and religious implications of some kind.

Ever since the Nazca lines were discovered, astronomer-mathematician Dr. Maria Reiche has devoted her life to studying them and attempting to establish correlations between them and astronomical occurrences. She was specially recorded some of her conclusions for the Unesco Courier. "The perfect proportions of these figures, some of them 200 or 300 metres long, suggest that they might have been made in order to be seen from the air. They could represent constellations which, as in other ancient cultures, were considered to be divinities. These constellations characterize the different epochs of the year according to their visibility at night. The most important time of the year was always December because it was then that water was expected to flow in the drier rivers and people prepared for this event by making ploughs... In Nazca this water-announcing constellation was the Big Dipper. When afraid the water would not appear, the people would draw on the ground an image of the water-brining divinity, that is the constellation which always appeared at the same time as the water, so big that the divinity could see itself from high up and be reminded to send water again. For several reasons the Big Dipper is depicted as a monkey. The spider can be considered to represent Orion."

Not all archaeologists agree with Dr. Reiche's theories, but they pay tribute to her determination to preserve the fragile Nazca lines for posterity, so that even if their mystery is never fully explained they will remain among the most beautiful creations of human ingenuity.