The Nazca are famous for their impressive lines carved into the Peruvian desert, but they also built an incredible system of aqueducts, some of which still function today. The system is covered in spiral openings, called puquios, but their function remained unclear – until now.
Rosa Lasaponara and a team from the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis in Italy have discovered that the puquios’ corkscrew-shaped tunnels funnel wind into a system of underground canals that push the water where it needs to go. The team used satellite images to pinpoint the position of all the puquios across the Nazca region and then compared them to how water sources and settlements were distributed…
“The puquios were the most ambitious hydraulic project in the Nazca area and made water available for the whole year, not only for agriculture and irrigation but also for domestic needs,” Lasaponara told the BBC.
Source: An Ancient Peruvian Mystery Has Been Solved From Space | IFLScience
I don’t know if you bothered to scroll down and read the comments or not. The discussion there centers on the idea that the purpose of the ostensible “solution” of “An Ancient Peruvian Mystery” is to refute the “ancient aliens” hypothesis a la von Daeniken. Opinions seem to fall out about evenly–half or so argue that the scientific “solution” of the problem doesn’t disprove the “ancient aliens” hypothesis, the other half trumpets the clarifying rationality that scientific scrutiny brings to bear on such “mysteries”.
I suspect that both sides of the argument are misapplied. It’s easy to pooh-pooh the “ancient alienists”, less so to understand that the “modern rationalists” may be approximately as goofy. I tend to think that artifactual remains of prehistoric cultures are so far removed from any prospect of modern comprehension, that to supply any interpretation of them at all–be it “ancient aliens” or “the puquios were the most ambitious hydraulic project”–is to do little more than guess or project. That both the “ancient aliens” and the “hydraulic project” hypotheses are projections of our contemporary life seems obvious–and that even if one believes the former speculation or the latter has a certain plausibility.