David Johnson is a man in a hurry. Carrying a battered leather shoulder bag and sweating profusely in the searing desert heat, he chatters nonstop as he scrambles up a stony, barren hill in the Nasca region of southern Peru. Johnson, a retired high school social studies teacher from Poughkeepsie, New York, thinks he has discovered the secret behind one of the world's most enduring archaeological mysteries, and he can't wait to show off how he got the idea. He tops the hill and stops, sets his feet, purses his lips, and hitches up his pants with his elbows to signal he is ready to make his point. The sun is low, the shadows sharp. Johnson steps aside theatrically. "That's what I saw," he announces, and points.
Below, a parched pampa, or desert, stretches southward for miles toward a distant peak in the Andes Mountains. On the valley floor, a gigantic geometric figure— a trapezoid hundreds of feet long and some 30 yards wide— has been precisely drawn in lines of piled stones, the open center looking as if it has been swept clean. Extending from the trapezoid, two perfectly straight lines of stones shoot southward toward dark clefts in the faraway peak. Johnson claims the clefts are geologic faults that collect precious runoff water from the mountains and feed natural underground aquifers that course through the desert valley. "Right here, I sat down and said, 'My God, I know what the lines of Nasca mean!' " he says. "They're tracing underground water sources!"
Johnson's companion, Steve Mabee, removes his bush hat to wipe away sweat as he gazes in wonder at the enormous trapezoid, one of more than 1,000 enigmatic ground drawings that cover 400 square miles of the bone-dry and sparsely populated Nasca region near Peru's southern coast. Created between 200 B.C. and A.D. 1000 by desert dwellers who left no written record of their culture, the Nasca lines are a mystifying mosaic of straight lines, sprawling geometric forms, and cartoonlike animal figures. Ever since Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mej’a Xesspe happened upon the lines as he hiked the desert hills in 1927, scientists and curiosity seekers have puzzled over the ground drawings and offered explanations that range from the fanciful (a huge astronomical calendar) to the ludicrous (landing strips for alien spaceships). Mabee, a hydrogeologist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has followed Johnson into the desert because he considers his underground water sources theory plausible enough to merit testing. "We make maps of our water lines. Maybe the Nasca people did, too, and just put them on the ground," Mabee says. "Dave has a good idea— a simple explanation that makes sense because water is the number one priority in this area."
