Chile’s Ancient Hill Art
Mysterious patterns adorn the hills of Chile’s Atacama desert. Watching over the plains below are giant figures of people and animals carved out of the land by prehistoric artists.
There is still intense ___ 31 ___ about exactly who made these so-called geoglyphs, and when and why they were drawn. “Geoglyphs are notoriously difficult to date,” says Ran Boytner of the University of California, who has studied the patterns in the Tarapacá region of north Chile. “And if we cannot know when a geoglyph was made, how can we know who made them?”
In an effort to ___ 32 ___ clues to their origin, Luis Briones of the University of Tarapacá conducted the first systematic study of the thousands of documented geoglyphs found in southern Peru and northern Chile. Geoglyphs are found elsewhere in the world – the chalk figures in southern England are a well-known example – but it is their sheer concentration in the Atacama desert that impresses researchers.
Briones has identified key regional variations in the patterns. ___ 33 ___, in the Arica region, there are no geometric geoglyphs, but there are figures of eagles, herons, monkeys and people. This style might derive from the Amazon, Briones suggests. Around the gully of Camarones, the most common figure is a double-outline square with a filling of fine gravel, which is interpreted as a ritual corral. The Incas, who are known to have conquered the region, built their animal enclosures in a similar way.
So ___ 34 ___ the geoglyphs might well have guided caravans through the desert, explaining why many are found near fresh water, it seems they were also constructed by different ethnic groups to mark out their symbolic territories, Briones says. And, according to Ran Boytner, the regional differences suggest that some of the geoglyphs were made by settled farmers, not nomads. Irrigation agriculture probably developed here in about 1000 BC. “Nomads will erect the same geoglyphs wherever they go, so if they created them, one would expect to find a ___ 35 ___ degree of standardisation all over northern Chile,” Boytner points out.
Emma Young, New Scientist