3 ms·

Is "religious purposes" a kind of catch-all cliche? One doesn't have to think it's aliens to consider the necessary economics of building these things. You need

Is "religious purposes" a kind of catch-all cliche? One doesn't have to think it's aliens to consider the necessary economics of building these things. You need to feed, water and house all the people doing it, their families can't be far, and those resources have to come from somewhere and someone has to collect and move them. Just a threat of force seems improbable, given the basic economics of that as well. Celestial navigation or regional defence seems like the minimum probable reason. Also it's a desert with no landmarks except these lines. If you follwed those lines without the map, you might not know you were going in circles and you would run out of water and food pretty quickly. There are probably short cuts where sentries could see an advancing group following the lines and alert the settlement while the invaders took the long way in. Maybe prey animals would follow the lines in search of water as well separating them from cover and making them tired and easy to harvest. The directions could be transmitted orally and encoded pictorally without someone being able to see the whole picture. These seem more plausible than "religious purposes," which tendentiously sets up religion as magical thinking, and the people who built these structures as irrational.

IanCal 3y ago
Outside of the fact that this is a paper on finding them rather than interpreting them, a few key points. > Celestial navigation or regional defence seems like the minimum probable reason. The blog post says "or astronomical significance" which seems to cover the first part. I'm really not sure what regional defence you get from: > With this approach, we identified four new geoglyphs in the northern area of the Nasca Pampa, namely: a humanoid, a pair of legs, a fish, and a bird and they're dug down just a few inches. > There are probably short cuts where sentries could see an advancing group following the lines If your regional defence rests on trusting enemies to walk around in small circles following a shallow line dug in the shape of a monkey, you are likely to have a bad time. > These seem more plausible than "religious purposes," which tendentiously sets up religion as magical thinking, and the people who built these structures as irrational. It's probably worth seeing what scholars actually say about this, there are some links on the wiki pages, as they'll have thought a lot more about it than you or I. But I'd not be surprised by some belief system leading people to create what largely seems to be art. > One doesn't have to think it's aliens to consider the necessary economics of building these things. You need to feed, water and house all the people doing it, their families can't be far, and those resources have to come from somewhere and someone has to collect and move them. Just a threat of force seems improbable, given the basic economics of that as well. They're shallow lines, not huge towering structures. From the wiki page on the lines: > With careful planning and simple technologies, Nickell proved that a small team of people could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance
- motohagiography 3y ago
  Indeed, some scholars have probably thought about it more than I have, but apparently they aren't here. Maybe it's just art, but even art has an economical purpose that yields information about the suffiecient and necessary conditions to create it, and it is not merely an expression of the magical thinking implied by what is usually referred to as ritual and religious purposes. If it takes "days," you still need to get those days of water out there in addition to the weight of food and shelter. If their threats were nomadic, a false path imposes costs on incoming threats, and for as you say, the cost of only a few days with a small team. One set of ideas provides testable hypothesis - the other produces unfalsifiable categories of "ritual purposes" and it seems like lazy journalism. I hear exasperation about ancient aliens type theories from academics all the time, but when you read all these "ritual purposes" cliche statements, it's hard to see how they didn't do it to themselves and invite the kookery on their own disciplines.

IanCal 3y ago

Outside of the fact that this is a paper on finding them rather than interpreting them, a few key points. > Celestial navigation or regional defence seems like the minimum probable reason. The blog post says "or astronomical significance" which seems to cover the first part. I'm really not sure what regional defence you get from: > With this approach, we identified four new geoglyphs in the northern area of the Nasca Pampa, namely: a humanoid, a pair of legs, a fish, and a bird and they're dug down just a few inches. > There are probably short cuts where sentries could see an advancing group following the lines If your regional defence rests on trusting enemies to walk around in small circles following a shallow line dug in the shape of a monkey, you are likely to have a bad time. > These seem more plausible than "religious purposes," which tendentiously sets up religion as magical thinking, and the people who built these structures as irrational. It's probably worth seeing what scholars actually say about this, there are some links on the wiki pages, as they'll have thought a lot more about it than you or I. But I'd not be surprised by some belief system leading people to create what largely seems to be art. > One doesn't have to think it's aliens to consider the necessary economics of building these things. You need to feed, water and house all the people doing it, their families can't be far, and those resources have to come from somewhere and someone has to collect and move them. Just a threat of force seems improbable, given the basic economics of that as well. They're shallow lines, not huge towering structures. From the wiki page on the lines: > With careful planning and simple technologies, Nickell proved that a small team of people could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance

motohagiography 3y ago
Indeed, some scholars have probably thought about it more than I have, but apparently they aren't here. Maybe it's just art, but even art has an economical purpose that yields information about the suffiecient and necessary conditions to create it, and it is not merely an expression of the magical thinking implied by what is usually referred to as ritual and religious purposes. If it takes "days," you still need to get those days of water out there in addition to the weight of food and shelter. If their threats were nomadic, a false path imposes costs on incoming threats, and for as you say, the cost of only a few days with a small team. One set of ideas provides testable hypothesis - the other produces unfalsifiable categories of "ritual purposes" and it seems like lazy journalism. I hear exasperation about ancient aliens type theories from academics all the time, but when you read all these "ritual purposes" cliche statements, it's hard to see how they didn't do it to themselves and invite the kookery on their own disciplines.