IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 256

Between the towns of Nazca and Palpa in southern Peru lies a stony plateau known as the Pampa Colorada. Its surface is marked with hundreds of geometric shapes: long straight lines, trapezoids, triangles and spirals. Alongside them are pictures of animals and plants, among them a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider, a whale and a condor. Some of the individual shapes extend for several hundred metres. Because the ground is almost flat and the designs are so large, their full extent becomes apparent only from the air. The area was added to UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1994.

The designs were made by clearing stones from the surface. The desert floor is covered with reddish-brown pebbles coated with iron oxide, and beneath them lies a lighter, yellowish soil. By removing the darker stones and piling them along the edges of the shapes they had chosen, the builders exposed the pale ground underneath. The resulting trenches are shallow, usually no more than ten or fifteen centimetres deep, so small groups of people with simple tools could have created even the largest figures over many seasons. No single generation need have been responsible for the whole plateau.

Such shallow marks would have vanished long ago in most environments. They survive here because the Pampa Colorada is one of the driest places on Earth, with rain so rare that erosion by water is limited. Wind is less destructive than might be expected: the dark stones absorb heat during the day and warm the air immediately above them, and this layer of rising air lifts the wind clear of the surface. Flat, stable ground has done the rest.

Who made the designs, and when, is harder to establish. Most are attributed to the Nazca culture, which flourished on the south coast of Peru from roughly the first century BCE, but some may be the work of the earlier Paracas people. Some figures are cut into the sides of low hills, while others lie on the open plain, and this difference in position is one of the clues used to group them. The dating of individual figures is difficult, because clearing away stones left little organic material to analyse. Archaeologists therefore disagree about the order in which the designs were made, and estimates for the oldest of them range over several centuries.

Systematic study began in the twentieth century. In the 1920s the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe examined the lines from the surrounding hills and interpreted them as sacred pathways. In 1941 the American historian Paul Kosok flew over the desert and began a survey, remarking that the lines resembled the markings of a gigantic astronomical calendar. His idea was taken up by Maria Reiche, a German-born mathematician who had worked with him. Reiche spent the rest of her life mapping, measuring and defending the site, living in a small house beside the desert until her death in 1998.

Reiche's astronomical explanation is no longer widely accepted. Statisticians pointed out that, with so many lines drawn across the plateau, a fair number would line up with the sun or with particular stars purely by chance, and critics observed that only a minority of the designs point to anything in the sky. Attention turned instead to water. The anthropologist Johan Reinhard argued that many of the lines are connected with the springs and rivers on which life in the desert depended, and with the mountains that were believed to control the water supply.

Others have emphasised movement. Fragments of broken pottery lie on and beside many of the lines, and some archaeologists interpret them as the remains of vessels smashed during ceremonies, when people walked along the cleared paths. On this view the straight lines were processional routes rather than messages to the sky. A related suggestion is that the designs were meant to be seen not from above but from the hills at their edges, or by the people taking part in the rituals themselves.

New figures are still being found. Aerial photography and drones have made survey work much quicker, and in 2024 a team led by Masato Sakai of Yamagata University in Japan reported that it had used artificial intelligence to identify more than three hundred previously unrecorded designs. Many are small and faint, and fieldwork has since confirmed a number of them on the ground. The discoveries suggest that the plateau holds more figures than anyone had supposed, and that the small, inconspicuous drawings may outnumber the celebrated large ones.

Damage is a constant concern. Sudden heavy rain, sometimes linked to El Niño, has washed stones and mud across parts of the desert, and in 2018 a lorry driver left deep tyre tracks through the lines after leaving the Pan-American Highway, which runs close to some of the figures. Accidental intrusions of this kind are hard to prevent in an area too large to guard effectively, and proposals for new roads or for mining in the region have repeatedly worried archaeologists.

Protection has improved since the World Heritage listing. A buffer zone around the property restricts new construction, and guards patrol the desert, although the area is far too large to watch continuously. From ground level most of the designs are almost invisible, and visitors are kept to viewing platforms and hillsides rather than allowed to walk among the figures. Even so, the lines remain vulnerable, and their survival still depends on the extraordinary dryness that has preserved them for two thousand years.

In the seventeenth century the city of Edo, now Tokyo, became one of the largest and busiest cities in the world. Among the trades that flourished there was a form of commercial publishing that produced what the Japanese called ukiyo-e, 'pictures of the floating world'. These were woodblock prints, printed on paper and sold for modest sums to townspeople. Their subjects were the theatre, the pleasure districts, famous places and, later, landscapes. Many prints were pasted onto walls and screens, used as wrapping paper or thrown away, and the survival of those that remain is as much a matter of luck as of care.

The prints are remarkable for the precision of their manufacture. A single image in full colour might require a dozen separate blocks, and some required more than twenty, each carrying one colour. The blocks were cut from cherry wood, chosen because its fine, even grain holds a sharp edge and resists wear. The paper was handmade from the bark of the mulberry, strong enough to be handled repeatedly and absorbent enough to take water-based ink. Before printing it was dampened, so that it would accept colour from the block under pressure.

Printmaking was a team activity with a clear hierarchy. The publisher financed the enterprise, chose the subject and the artist, and took the commercial risk. The artist supplied a drawing in ink. The carver pasted the drawing face downwards onto the block and cut away everything that was not to appear in print, so that the lines of the brush became raised ridges of wood. The printer applied ink with a brush, laid the damp paper on the block and rubbed the back with a baren, a disc of coiled bamboo sheath, until the image had transferred.

Keeping the colours in register was the hardest part of the process. Every block carried the same two marks: a small L-shaped notch at one corner and a straight line along one edge. These were cut in exactly the same position on the key block, which printed the black outlines of the design, and on every colour block taken from it. The printer laid the paper against the marks before each impression. Because damp paper changes size slightly as it is handled, a long run demanded steady, consistent work to stop the colours drifting out of alignment.

The earliest prints were in black only, and any colour was added by hand. From the 1740s printers began to use two or three colour blocks as well, but true full-colour printing, with a separate block for every colour, is generally credited to Suzuki Harunobu around 1765. The new prints were called nishiki-e, or 'brocade pictures'. Subtle effects became possible: colour could be graded across a sky by wiping ink from part of the block before printing, and a design could be embossed without ink so that it appeared only as a relief in the paper.

The most celebrated images came a few decades later. Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, made between about 1830 and 1832, showed the mountain from different places and in different weather, and included the print known in the West as The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Utagawa Hiroshige's series of the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, published from 1833, took the stopping places of the great road between Edo and Kyoto as its subject. Both series used Prussian blue, a pigment recently imported from Europe, which was deeper and more stable than the blues available before.

Prints are unusually informative objects, which is why the history of the medium can be reconstructed in such detail. Artists signed their work, publishers added their seals, and from the 1790s the government required official approval, recorded by an inspector with a further seal. Those marks allow a print to be attributed and roughly dated. The carvers and printers, by contrast, are largely anonymous: a few signed their work, but most did not, and the craftsmen responsible for the finest printing in the history of the medium are mostly unknown.

Survival is another limitation. Prints were cheap and were used, so much of what remains is faded, trimmed, or mounted in albums and stained by the adhesive employed. Early impressions, taken while the blocks were fresh, are far sharper than late ones, and scholars have learned to date impressions partly by the wear visible on the blocks, including the breaks and repairs that appear as a block ages.

After 1868 the industry went into a long decline. The old order that had supported it disappeared, and with it the townspeople who had bought the pictures. At the same time, photographs and lithographs printed from stone or metal offered images that were more lifelike and far quicker to make. The new government, anxious to modernise, looked to Europe and North America for models in art as in everything else, and the skills of the block cutter and printer were no longer thought worth teaching.

A revival came in the twentieth century. The publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō worked with artists to make new prints for sale abroad, using the traditional division of labour; the movement became known as shin-hanga. Others rejected that method altogether. The artists of sōsaku-hanga, the creative print movement, cut their own blocks and printed their own sheets, insisting that a print was the work of a single person rather than of a team of craftsmen. A handful of traditional workshops survive today, and some craftspeople have been designated Living National Treasures of Japan.

Every year the list of threatened monuments grows longer. Coastlines erode, rivers rise, cities spread, and in each case someone eventually proposes the same remedy: take the monument to pieces, carry it away and rebuild it somewhere safer. The idea is not new, and neither is the argument about whether it is a sensible response to danger or a confession of failure. Two very different kinds of rescue have been attempted, and the difference between them lies at the heart of the debate.

The most famous rescue was prompted by a dam. In the late 1950s the Egyptian government announced that the Aswan High Dam would create a reservoir, Lake Nasser, which would submerge the temples carved into the cliffs at Abu Simbel, including the great temple of Ramses II. Egypt asked other countries for money and technical help. In 1960 the Director-General of UNESCO launched an international appeal, warning that the temples would be lost unless they were dismantled and rebuilt above the water. About fifty countries contributed. Between 1964 and 1968 the temples were cut into blocks, some weighing many tonnes, and re-erected on a plateau overlooking the lake. The temples of Philae were later moved to the nearby island of Agilkia.

Not every rescue involves a museum or an artificial hill. In 1999 the United States National Park Service moved the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, on the coast of North Carolina, which was in danger of falling into the Atlantic. It was lifted onto a steel framework, pushed along rails and set down nearly a kilometre inland, on a site chosen to resemble its old position as closely as possible. The lighthouse was moved not out of its landscape but within it, and that distinction matters.

Critics of relocation begin from the observation that a monument is never only stone. Much of its meaning lies in its setting: in the relationship between a temple and the river beside it, a tomb and the hills it faces, a building and the streets around it. It also lies in continuity, in the fact that the monument has stood in that place, often for thousands of years. Move it, even carefully, and something is lost that no amount of accurate reconstruction can restore. Some critics go further, arguing that a relocated monument is no longer a historic building at all but a replica of one.

This view has been given formal shape. The Burra Charter, adopted by the Australian branch of ICOMOS in 1979, sets out principles for the conservation of places of cultural significance. Among them is the rule that moving a place, or part of it, is generally unacceptable unless it is the only way to ensure its survival. Most conservation bodies now work on the same assumption: intervention should be the minimum necessary, and a monument should be kept where it is for as long as that remains possible.

The World Heritage Committee has taken a similar position on setting. In 2009 it removed the Dresden Elbe valley in Germany from the World Heritage list, having concluded that a new bridge across the river had damaged the cultural landscape that made the valley valuable; Liverpool lost its status in 2021 for comparable reasons. Those decisions concerned building beside a site rather than moving the site itself, but the logic is uncomfortable for anyone who favours relocation. If a bridge a few hundred metres away can destroy a site's value, moving the monument altogether must do so more thoroughly still.

There are practical objections as well. Dismantling is risky in itself: blocks crack, painted surfaces flake, and the record of how the parts were fitted together is lost for ever. Abu Simbel was saved partly because the operation was backed by money and engineering skill on a scale that most threatened sites cannot hope for. Costs are enormous, and money spent moving one famous monument is money that cannot be spent on protecting dozens of less glamorous ones.

The question of who decides is equally awkward. Relocation is usually proposed by engineers and approved by committees far away, while the people who live beside a monument may find that access is restricted, the surrounding land fenced off and the profits from visitors going to someone else. Worst of all, the promise of rescue can weaken the will to deal with the cause of the danger.

Digital recording is sometimes offered as a way out of the dilemma. Laser scanning and photogrammetry can measure a monument to the millimetre and produce a model that anyone can explore online. Such records are immensely valuable for research, and they preserve something even if the building is lost. But a record is a document, not the thing itself. Nobody would argue that a scanned library makes it unnecessary to stop the roof from leaking.

My own view is that relocation should be treated as an emergency measure, not a routine instrument of policy. Where the alternative is certain loss, and where a monument can be moved within its own landscape, as the lighthouse was, the case for action is strong and the objections are outweighed. What cannot be defended is the shipment of architecture to museums in other countries, however carefully it is justified by the weakness of the state that owns it, or the use of rescue as an excuse to clear ground for development. The burden of proof should lie with those who propose to move; the first duty of conservation remains to slow the processes that make moving necessary.