The Sajama Lines

The Claim

Ancient people spent over 3000 years carving thousands of straight lines in the floor for no reason.

The Sajama Lines are a series of thousands of straight lines ranging between 3 and 10 feet wide and up to 11 miles long. They surround the Sajama volcano and often cross one another and form a web-like pattern.

The web covers an area of more than 5.5 million acres, and is 15 times larger than the second biggest ancient line network, the Nazca lines of Peru.

The strange thing about them is, well, everything. No one knows the original purpose, and they don’t seem to draw any kind of pattern or symbol; and how they maintained the accuracy of keeping them perfectly straight isn’t understood.

There have been relatively few studies conducted on the lines, but an investigating team from the University of Pennsylvania states:

“While many of these sacred lines extend as far as ten or twenty kilometres (and perhaps further), they all seem to maintain a remarkable straightness despite rugged topography and natural obstacles. The sheer number and length of these lines is often difficult to perceive from ground level, but from the air or hilltop vantage points, they are stunning.”

There were several civilisations that built the lines, starting out with one tribe, and then after they became no more, whoever the next one that came along took up the work themselves. Most of the lines have various dates to them as to when they were built, but the earliest estimates date them to be earlier than 2000 BC.

Three main questions persist:

1) How did they keep them so straight for such large distances, even over rugged terrain?

2) Why do some of them not go anywhere and run almost parallel to other lines, making it pointless to make a new one if it were a path of some kind?

3) Why did this continue over various cultures? Whoever started them would have had their own traditions and religion, and when the next people came along and overthrew them and implemented their own, why carry on the lines if they are for religious purposes?

It seems no one has a good explanation for the lines, but whoever made them put in a huge amount of effort. They were made simply by raking away the top layer and digging down a few inches, nothing more, and since there is no paving of any kind and at no point any sort of building works such as arches, they seem quite pointless.