...
Of course, coming upon this after unknown hours lost in contemplation of the NAZCA LINES, I guess just about anything would.
I have it in my head, because I zoomed in as closely as I could, and noodled around, that the Nazca Plain was an ancient population center. Beside all the popular forms they're always talking about, is a kind of grid that anyone, anyone, anyone searching the surface of this planet for evidence of intelligent life would identify as a metropolitan area.
It used to be forested, with, obviously, clearings for public spaces and roads. It is also known that the Nazca took people's heads for ritual purposes. It is also known that civilizations who sacrifice each other, eat each other, or decapitate each other, even if everybody's into it, don't want to be the ones sacrificed, eaten or decapitated. This leads to people banding together and only doing these things to people of another band.
If you zoom down there, try to picture it as forested. Each band would have their own totem animal or glyph, their own labyrinth through the trees to get to their dwellings. This would keep out people not in their band. They could get out in the day to go to the markets in the public spaces and back in at night with little fear of being followed successfully by someone who wanted to drink sacred juices out of their skulls.
It looks to me as though there was some sort of calamity, probably a monster earthquake, that altered the course of a major artery there. Probably flattened everything, cut off the aquifer that was watering its forest. The trees are dying. The survivors' cover from each other is vanishing. They start marking the labyrinths on the ground, planting trees like crazy to try to get their cover happening again. It's not working. Flash floods eroding the soil every few years. They keep trying... until... everybody's moved away but the old people... who are pushing stones into their ancestral totem animal or glyph... just out of nostalgia....
Just a thought.
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