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Of Waterfalls and
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.COVER: Brazilian flag atop Cerro Kukenan. See, "Sez Who," Page 16.
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DDD6J~~r~
Impermeable layer below water table - -
David Fleming
karez.foggara, hattara, mina,andknown
by all sorts of other names as well; I will
call it the " filtration gallery" to avoid
confusion). It basically works like this: in
sloping ground, you dig a series of increasingly deep wells in a line until you
hit water. This done, you join the bottoms
oflhe wells with a slightly down-sloping
tunnel to tap the water table. Gravity does
the rest. The attached diagram shows
how a filtration gallery works.
These systems are known to have been
built in the Old World since at least the
eighth century BC and possibly earlier.
Some are very large indeed -- one in
central Iran is more than 40 kilometers
long and another up to 300 meters deep.
But most are more modest. Filtration
galleries are a most effective and environmentally sensitive way to recover subsurface water in arid regions. We think
that the Arabs brought them into Spain,
or at least spread their use: Madrid's
main water supply was provided by these
devices from at least the thirteenth century to the 1800 's, and the El Escorial
palace outside Madrid has its own private
gallery that supplies water for drinking
and for the gardens.
Yes, yes, you say, all very interesting,
but what does this have to do with Nazca?
Well, there are filtration galleries at
Nazca, known, from the Quechua word
for "spring of water", as puquios. Aha!
No doubt built by the Spanish, you cry,
who desperately needed masses of nonsaline water for growing grapes, olives
and sugar cane and watering their large
and thirsty horses. By 1527 the Spanish
SOUTH AMERICAN EXPLORER 25
View of Pica. northern Chile. showing an oasis which has been irrigated by filtration galleries since at
least the eighteenth century. The hut in the foreground stands on the ruins ofa colonial winery.
,~
'
26
moment?
Although local residents have known
aout the Nazca galleries since at least
1692, modem scholars only started paying serious attention to them in the l 920's
and 1930' s. In 1934, FranciscoGonz.Alez
Garcia, a Peruvian hydrological engineer, prepared a study of the system
(which was then in great disrepair) as
part of a wider plan to examine whether
these could be re-built to irrigate modem
Nazca farms. On the basis of a remark by
Garcilaso de la Vega that the region was
irrigated when the Incas conquered the
coast, Gonzalez Garcia concluded that
the galleries dated from the reign oflnca
Roca. Later, Peruvian archaeologists who
were contemporaries ofGonzalez Garcia,
such as Toribio Mejia Xesspe, Alberto
Regal Matienzo and Alberto Rossel
Castro, all came to believe that the filtration galleries were pre-Hispanic and oneand.:all assigned a Nazca period date to
them. Almost all later workers, both
Peruvian and North American, have
adopted this dating convention, including Katharina Schreiber, Georg Petersen
G. , Persis Clarkson, and Ronald I. Dom
(don't worry, all these names are in your
reading list). Those scholars who claimed
the galleries were introduced by the Spanish tended to be Old World specialists
with no specific interest in the Andes, so
the weight of argument in Peruvianist
circles has tended very strongly to favor
independent invention long before the
Spanish arrived.
In 1988 I gave a paper at an archaeological conference in which I claimed
that this dating and the notion of preHispanic invention of the galleries was
very doubtful. In 1991 Monica Barnes
and I published another paper laying out
the evidence against this claim in excruciating detail. Essentially, our argument
has two parts:
( l )Filtration galleries are found over
wide stretches of Spanish territory in
both the Old and New Worlds. The mechanics of filtration galleries were well
understood by engineers, farmers, lawyers, and landowners. They were introduced into Mexico, Chile, and central
Peru by the Spanish in the late 16th
cent4ry to provide water for residential
x,."'"
..... .
.--------------
-A D V E N T U R E S-
LACEY A. GUDE
Amazon/Brazil Specialist
AMAWN
(~~)6~~ ~~ ADVENTURERS
28