THE MEANING OF THE NAZCA LINES.

The Nazca lines are ancient geoglyphs located in the Ica region, in the Palpa and Nazca valleys, 280 miles South of Lima. They are drawn across the deserts and hills along the Eastern coast of Peru at the edge of the Western Andes at 2,000 feet above sea level. To reach them by road, travelers can take inter-provincial buses from the cities of Lima, Arequipa and Cuzco. There are no scheduled commercial flights to Ica.
The interesting figures of different designs on the surface of the desert, made over several centuries, are been related to an astronomical map that deals with an agricultural calendar that indicates sacred routes between Nazca religious sites. The weather was essentially important in their religious beliefs and vital to successful agriculture in their arid plains. They were very aware of the forces that were active in the universe and the required balance needed between them in order to preserve the force of life through the proper established time to harvest crops and the arrival of the rainy season. The only way of communication that the astronomers of the ancient Nazca people found available was through the performance of rituals over the sacred shapes that took the form of animals, plants or geometric patterns.
The lines were made remarkable easily by removing the oxidized surface rocks which lay closely scattered across the lighter colored desert pampa floor. They can easily be made by a single individual in a few days. One experiment illustrated that a small team could clear 16,000 square meters of desert in a week. The aridity of the desert has preserved them and many can still be seen today. The lines appear in great number closer to settlements and river courses. Most designs are only visible from the air but some were made on hillsides that are able to radiate and so made them visible from the ground (62 such points have been identified).  They were made with the purpose of directing travelers to the proper religious paths that needed to be walked repeatedly during their religious rituals, specially the trapezoids shapes that usually point in the direction of sacred water sources.
The creation of such large and impressive figures that are between 165 and 985 feet long, is made possible by carefully increasing the proportions taken from a small scale model. The mystery of these geoglyphs  lies in the complexity of the process used to create them on the ground; they are very stylized and each is drawn with a single unbroken line. In total, more than 300 examples of geometric, animal and human figures have been identified and collectively cover over 640 square kilometers of desert land. The shaped lines never cross each other and usually have a different starting and ending point. Many of the designs also appear on Nazca textiles and pottery decoration.
The hummingbird figure is the most well known of all the geoglyphs, due to its harmonic dimensions. The wingspan of the hummingbird is around 216 feet.
The first researcher to study the Nazca lines was Julio Cesar Tello, a Peruvian archaeologist, who in 1929 described them as "sacred highways." Maria Reiche, a German archaeologist, interpreted the Nazca lines and geoglyphs as a gigantic solar and lunar calendar for ancient Peruvian astronomers.