Calling all Geologists

[Eos of the Eons]

-13.715174, -75.875407

What the? -Google maps. Tracks. Explain. Pisco Valley, Peru.
Can't see how it could be manmade tracks. Anyone seen this before, it goes a couple of Km down the mountain... down to the valley.

[Hokulele]

I can't tell if those are really holes, or shrubs. Comparing them to dots on the right of your screen grab, I would guess shrubs.


ETA: I just found the area on Google Earth, and it does look like holes comparing the shadows to the trees further down the hill.

[UnrepentantSinner]

Can't see how it could be manmade tracks.

Why? All the woo sites that mention them say they're man sized. Probably something that could have been dug in a few hours depending on the terrain. A couple hundred workers digging for a couple of years and Ta Dah a "mystery".

[Dan O.]

Perhaps you are looking to the wrong field. Have you considered asking paleontologists?

[plumjam]

Well I see those African Killer Bees have moved into Peru already.
Watch out New Mexico.

[Reality Check]

According to the note by jokermig (translated by Google):
Strange and curious formation of holes in the form of perforated tape''''of unknown origin. It has approximately 15 metres wide by 1,500 long and Daniken mentions in his book Journey to Kiribati. Nobody seems to have a logical explanation about its origin or its purpose. Acceptable suggestions ...


One suggestion is water holes but there seem to be a lot of them.

Here are couple of close-up photos (http://www.xpeditionstv.com/X/Peru/Sand.html) of them.

[UnrepentantSinner]

Perhaps you are looking to the wrong field. Have you considered asking paleontologists?

Archaeologists/Anthropologists. :)

[Megalodon]

somebody lost their contacts :)

[geni]

I've seen areas where there had been tin mineing that looked a bit like that.

[Fitter]

Archaeologists/Anthropologists. :)
It was actually a cultural anthropologist, Rebecca Bradley, who showed them to us last night.

[Dan O.]

Not everything that looks like a regular formation is man made. I was thinking something like giant sponge mats on an ancient sea shore. Similar structures have been found to grow as individuals so they spread out and form regular patterns. A shore line would confine the growth to a narrow band.

The "Ancient City" to the East looks more like a cracked mud flat that has mostly eroded away.

[Beanbag]

Ore-reducing pits for some mining operation? Think mortar and pestle, where you smash ore to powder using some implement in a pit in the ground. As the ore breaks down, the hole gets deeper. Eventually, when the hole gets too deep, it becomes impractical to use, so you move a few feet to a fresh spot and start over.

Just a thought.

Beanbag

[casebro]

According to the note by jokermig (translated by Google):


One suggestion is water holes but there seem to be a lot of them.

Here are couple of close-up photos (http://www.xpeditionstv.com/X/Peru/Sand.html) of them.



The comments so often included with the satellite photos seem quite exaggerated- size of 15m across, slope of 45 degrees, make things sound difficult for a primitive society to build. Not so in the close up photos.

Per the close up photos, they are only one meter wide by one meter deep, in loose gravely type of dirt, and on nearly flat ground. Not hard for a man to dig at all. Nothing supernatural about them. Why somebody dug them would be the only question.

[I Ratant]

As they appear to be individual holes, not connected as you might expect were there something in the ground worth extracting, and they're "orchestrated" for a long distance up that rise, probably have a religious significance to the makers.
On "Stand in the hole day", everyone puts on their finest and gets in -their- hole, for the chief priests to bless, and tithe.

[Starthinker]

I think ancients got bored, too. Some artsy type hired a bunch of laborers and made a pattern that looked pretty in his/her eyes. Maybe something religious. Did anyone take samples from the bottoms to see if there were pigments, ash, or anything there?

[canadarocks]

Here is a web-site that has good closeup pictures. No convincing explanations here, but some good observations.
http://nazcamystery.com/pisco_valley.htm

[Olowkow]

The south end of the "road of craters" has what look like eyes and a mouth. Could it be some sort of snake like monster, which must be viewed like the line drawings from high above? Very cool. Also it looks like the "gaps" in the road are due to another road crossing or something flowing across at right angles.

[plumjam]

The only thing the photograph tells us is that the Incas were abysmal golfers.

[Boo]

Ask Louis Sachar.

http://www.louissachar.com/HolesBook.htm




Boo

[TX50]

...probably have a religious significance to the makers.
On "Stand in the hole day", everyone puts on their finest and gets in -their- hole, for the chief priests to bless, and tithe.

Or perhaps some religious observance that requires a fresh hole
to be dug each time - in homage to some chthonic deity?

[Eos of the Eons]

Meh, you guys are no help at all :D
However, I did get to hang out with Rebecca and Fitter yesterday, nah nah!

Here is a close-up:

[geni]

As they appear to be individual holes, not connected as you might expect were there something in the ground worth extracting,

Depends you might be tempted to dig on a fresh spot rather than where you dumped all your spoil for the first hole.

[Dan O.]

This is completely different from the picture I had earlier. It's not pits chiseled out of solid rock but simple holes dug in soft dirt and broken rock.

The only way I see this making sense for mining is if they were digging much deeper than what we see here and back filling the holes when they were done. A set of bricks could be laid into the walls as the hole is dug to keep it from collapsing. These bricks would be valuable and removed while backfilling to use on the next hole. When they were done there would have been an overburden of loose soil on top. Eventually the top soil would wash away and the back fill in the holes would settle leaving pits.

I don't buy that mining theory either. A little excavation would confirm it's bunk.

Agriculture is another possibility. At the top end of the pits there are a couple of caves and the surrounding cut in the hillside may have been caused by a long running spring. The potholes were dug to expose the fertile soil underneath leaving a protective wall. The spacing would be about right for a small tree.

But why one long line? Agriculture would tend to be concentrated near the water source. Maybe water flowed under this line in a natural shallow aquifer that just happens to be a consistent width. Yea, I don't buy this one either.

A defensive military structure? Nesting sites for birds? There are lots of "could be"s but nothing I've come up with really makes any sense. Maybe the whole thing is just art.

[skeptigirl]

According to the note by jokermig (translated by Google):


One suggestion is water holes but there seem to be a lot of them.

Here are couple of close-up photos (http://www.xpeditionstv.com/X/Peru/Sand.html) of them.That's great! Just what I've been looking for as a side trip on the Galapagos trip.

[Dan O.]

Could it be a fence? A structure designed to contain or redirect animals.

[casebro]

One possible practical reason would be to catch seasonal rains, so the maximum amount of water could soak in.

But I'll go the some sort of religious activity.

[Dan O.]

For rain catch, you would want to form mini-ridges that follow the contours. This would also help stop erosion which appears to be a more serious problem in that area.

If you look just to the east where the steep hills come closest to the river basin, there is an obvious wall that extends from the point of the hill down into the basin. The pits would complete an enclosure on the side of the valley for holding or grazing livestock.

The most obvious effect of these pits is that they would have been visible across the entire valley floor. This would be a giant advertising billboard saying "we are here!"