The damage Greenpeace did is worse than I’d realized. (Thanks to Tsu Dho Nimh for giving us the link to a graphic picture.)
You can see it very clearly in this picture from RT, assuming those naughty Russians haven’t faked it up.
That’s a mess.
Peru This Week points out that it hasn’t been established that the marks were not there before Greenpeace invaded the site.
Photographs taken yesterday at 5:05 p.m. by Captain Juan Carlos Ruiz are timely and demonstrate the current state of the lines. However, at the moment it is still unclear whether or not photographs taken prior to the incident correctly demonstrate the state up to the very moment the activists entered.
On their facebook page, Greenpeace International states, “We can assure you that absolutely NO damage was done. The message was written in cloth letters that laid on the ground without touching the Nazca lines. It was assessed by an experienced archaeologist, ensuring not even a trace was left behind.”
So an experienced archaeologist helped them barge onto a closed site to leave a “message”? That’s a baaaaaaaaaaad archaeologist.
Definitely the epic fail of the week. The best response I can come up with is the couple of panels below.
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2014/12/epic-fail.html
I really cannot imagine what they were thinking.
“The group left their footprints in the sand during the stunt, according to a top government official.” and some cloth
be watching for a bulletless guard in the near future
and listen for the real howling when climate change brings the big rains
Assholes.
As long as we’re all focusing on the real enemies: those damn greenpeace hippies!
A hard rain’s gonna fall indeed.
lung and throwaway, are you suggesting that we ignore damage to historical monuments because Greenpeace are the good guys ?
I find it possible to care about both renewables technology and also vandalism of internationally important heritage sites.
Greenpeace don’t get to act with impunity.
Have to wonder if this is another case of Europeans and Euro-Americans not showing the same respect to the works of First Peoples that they show to their own ancestors’ works.
Maybe, but we don’t know the ethnic makeup of the perps, only their nationalities, which were South American except for one European. And we don’t know anything about whose brilliant idea the whole thing was.
Lack of respect is hard to understand. I’m pretty sure all my ancestors were peasants eking out a living from inhospitable land when whoever it was created those amazing works of art. (I know they’re probably religious in some way, and thus separate from art as secular people understand it, but I can’t not see them as art.)
I don’t think this has much to do with a lack of respect for first people’s artifacts as much as it’s an example of how zeal (even in defense of noble causes) can blind people to any other concerns.
It’s the first time I see the Nasca lines next to people. They’re far, far smaller than I was ever led to expect. The idea that it was necessary to rise high above the ground to make that hummingbird is ridiculous.
I feel cheated.
Arrrgh, I guess I was projecting hopeful, there, when I thought it was photoshopped. 🙁