Pathways To The Gods: The Mystery of the Andes Lines

by Tony Morrison

The standard work on the Nasca lines—huge lines and figures etched on a desolate Peruvian plain near the Andes.

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Andrew Ives · Rating 3 out of 5]

As one might expect from looking at the cover photo of the hummingbird pictogram, this book would be about the Nasca lines, the animal drawings of which I think there are 300 or more? That's what I thought too, so I was rather disappointed that these hardly get a mention. Morrison mentions no more than 3 or 4 of them and only in passing. Instead, he concentrates on the 800+ long straight lines and cleared trapezoidal areas. Ok. Hmm. In investigating these, he talks to various other archaeologists and local people, some of whom think the lines point at stars in the sky, but it turns out they don't accurately point anywhere really. Others believe the lines are pathways to holy sites where nothing much happened and no real sign of that exists either these days, aside from some piles of stones that could've been laid there last week. Around the middle of the book, Morrison introduces the wak'as and the ceques, then spends the rest of the book going around in circles chasing these nonsensical descriptions throughout Peru, into Bolivia and almost Chile by the end. While Morrison writes reasonably well, the text is very well proofread, it is a little longwinded. The photos are ok, but all in b&w and hardly spectacular. The unsatistfying upshot of this book is that essentially, neither Morrison nor the experts in this field found out anything about anything, and ignored the glaring thing on the cover that I read the book to learn about. 3/5

[Palak · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book sounded very interesting because I thought it would solve this mystery about the lines. But this book did no such thing. It just leaves you with more questions than answers. Also, it is a very old book, so the data could be out of date. I will not recommend this book.