Famous as the “Lady of the Lines”, Dr. Maria Reiche-Grosse (1903-1998) almost single-handedly photographed, recorded, and protected the Nazca Lines in Peru. Originally from Dresden, Germany, Reiche was a trained mathematician and archaeologist who made her way to Peru by 1932.
It was after working as a private tutor for the child of the German consulate in Cuzco that she became a translator and conservator at the Museo de Arqueología in Lima. Reiche worked multiple jobs to make ends meet at this time, eventually meeting American historian and archaeologist Professor Paul Kosok while working in a café and agreeing to translate his English paper on the Nazca lines into Spanish.
By 1939, Reiche had begun working with Kosok on the observations of the Nazca Lines. She soon took over the project as a solo one – even moving into a house on site in 1946 (in the middle of the desert!) so she could dedicate more time to the project. It was quickly after moving there that she discovered the first of the geoglyphs to be fully uncovered and recorded by her – The Spider. Finding the geoglyphs was not her initial aim, which was to record and hopefully understand what the lines themselves were, but became a major part of her work. Nowadays, her house there is a visitor attraction known as the Maria Reiche Museum – complete with a waxwork of Maria herself!
The Museo Maria Reiche, with a waxwork Maria sat at her work desk
Reiche cleaned, observed, recorded, illustrated, and conserved the Nazca lines throughout the rest of her working life – over 50 years in total. She commented once that there were even rumours of her being a witch because she went through so many brooms cleaning the lines by hand every day! Balancing precariously on top of ladders to get the birds-eye view needed for recognising the animal shapes the lines formed, Reiche became a figure of interest and excitement beyond the archaeological community. An observation tower was gifted to her in 1976 largely due to the funding of her sister Renate, her friend Andrea Marguia Sender, and the organization Pescaperu.
Maria (right) and her sister Renate in 1910. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Aerial photography of the lines was a large part of her recording process and became key in justifying the protection of the lines. The office for aerial photography at the Peruvian air force (SAN) helped her throughout her 40 years of personal work on-site, giving her the chance to fly over the lines many times and the opportunity to extensively photograph the lines from above. Her first flight in 1947 contributed to her first publication on the lines, “Los Dibujos Gigantescos en el suelo de las Pampas de Nasca y Palpa. Descripción y ensayo de interpretación” (Mystery On The Desert – a New Revelation Of Ancient Peru). In 1978, Queen Sofia of Spain visited Peru and flew over the Nazca lines with Dr. Maria Reiche.
Throughout her work on the Pampa and the Nazca lines, the largest source of financial support came from her sister Dr. Renate Reiche-Grosse, who also helped her in her battles for the protection of the lines. Political and legal battles over the lines’ protection were a large part of her work from the moment she began working on them, beginning with resisting the government expansion of irrigation systems into the Pampa valley in 1955 to allow the building of a cotton plantation.
Ultimately, Reiche used her academic talks given around the world to encourage resistance against the destruction of the lines for agricultural purposes. She hired a watchman in 1976 to patrol the lines and guard against tourists walking across them, and further hired six caretakers that patrol the whole area. By 1994, she successfully had the Nazca lines recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Dr. Maria Reiche received Peruvian citizenship in 1992 after a lifetime of work contributing to Peru academically, economically, and socially. She received multiple honorary doctorates, the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Order of the Sun of Peru in the grade of Grand Cross. Amongst these, and many many other awards, there are also schools, roads, an airport, and a public park named after her. Reiche passed away in 1998, leaving behind her daughter Ana Maria Cogorno as president of the Maria Reiche Association. The Google front page displayed a doodle depicting her working on the Nazca lines on her 115th birthday in 2018 – a worldwide digital immortalization of this most impressive and formidable TrowelBlazer.
References and further reading
- International Maria Reiche Association for Art and Science
- HTW Maria Reiche Association page
- ‘Maria Reiche and the Technology behind the Nazca Lines’ by Javier Yanes (2019)
- Maria Reiche Museum listing, Atlas Obscura
- ‘Maria Reiche Y Los Dioses De Nazca’ by Clorinda Caller Iberico (1984)
- ‘Maria Reiche: Who was the German Governess who devoted her life to Peru’s mysterious Nazca Lines?’ by Joe Sommerlad (2018)
Written by Isabel King as part of the TrowelBlazers Digital Fieldwork Project at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.
It’s worth noting that Ana Maria Cogorno is not Maria Reiche’s biological daughter, and that her self-identification as her successor such has not gone unchallenged, e.g. American Anthropologist (vol. 104, American Anthropological Association, 2002) states she “had herself declared Reiche’s adopted daughter and sole heir… after a prolonged legal battle, Peru’s Supreme Court annulled the adoption, declaring there to have been irregularities in the judicial process. Cogorno was required to return all of Reiche’s research”