The Nazca Lines

About 200 miles southeast of Lima, Peru, between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, there are lines etched into the desert. The glyphs have remained intact for centuries, and have been avidly studied since their discovery in the late 1920s.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly fro and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and kind
of we're doing this topic today because we've gotten several
requests to do some South American history and so many

(00:24):
and can we can we talk for a second about
why we have not had a ton of them? Yeah,
much of the information is in languages that neither of
us read fluently. Yeah, and it makes me really sad
because I'll find some awesome, awesome historical figure from South
American history, and I'll be able to find like a
short Encyclopedia article in English, and then anything more substantive

(00:44):
is in Spanish or Portuguese or another language that I
sadly do not read well enough to use as a
history source on this podcast. Yeah, that's a general trickiness
in multiple areas. I mean, there are a lot of
there's a lot of African history I would love to
cover that it's a bit hard to find source material,
or if we do find source material, it's deeply biased

(01:04):
in the favor of whoever was colonizing. Yeah, so that's
sort of why sometimes these don't get as much play
as we would like. But luckily today's topic has been
studied by so many people that there's loads of information
out there. Uh. And that is the Nasca lines. So
to give it some contexts, about two hundred miles southeast

(01:26):
of Lima, Peru, nestled right between the Andes Mountains and
the Pacific Ocean, there are these huge lines etched into
the desert. When I see lines, that's not really entirely
accurate in terms of characterization. You've probably seen photos of
these before, but if you haven't, they're really really astonishing.
We're talking about large scale designs. Uh. And some of

(01:49):
them are things you would recognize, like a monkey or
a spider or a condor. There's a hummingbird. Others are geometric.
And because they're etched into rock and have survived thousands
of years, this was clearly like a serious amount of
work that went into the creation of these. The environment
in this part of the world has really helped preserve

(02:09):
the work of the Nasca. It's a really arid climate
and there's not a lot of erosion, which means that
even tracks from chariots that were left in the sixteenth
century by warring Conquestador factions are all still visible in
some places. Yeah, there are like, uh, tire tracks from
the nineteen twenties in that area that you can still
clearly see footprints last for hundreds of years. It's unusual

(02:33):
because it is close to the ocean, yet it is very,
very dry. Uh. And for decades, these designs caused a
lot of head scratching because we didn't understand why a
culture would devote so much energy to creating art that
we thought they couldn't really see themselves because these are
so expansive, and we'll talk a little bit about their
size in a moment that you know, it seems you'd

(02:54):
only see them from the air, right. A lot of
the photos of them that exists are taken from from aircraft. Yeah,
I mean they've been featured in like coffee table books
of like aerial archaeology. Uh. And it is hard to
imagine how they would ever look like anything from ground level.
But UH, scientists and researchers are continuing to uncover new

(03:16):
information about these pieces of landscape art. We're learning more
all the time. The picture keeps getting fuller, and there's
still a good bit of theory in the mix. Though
we think we've figured out what these lines might be about,
or some researchers who think they've figured it out. There
have been worrying opinions on this UH, but there's no

(03:36):
you know, final Oh, it's all been made clear by
this discovery. And as a note, there is a modern
day town of Nasco, which has a population of about
thirty thou people. But for this discussion, when we use
the word Nasco, we're referring to the ancient culture or
the location of the glyphs. Right. So, as I said before,
the Nascar region one of the driest places on Earth.

(03:59):
It often goes more in a year without rain uh.
And the Pampa, the Nasca desert sometimes it will get
like a rainfall of twelve minutes a year, so very
very little moisture going on. The Nasca culture, which predates
the Incans, was in its flourished phase between two hundred
and six hundred, and there are to these lines, more

(04:20):
than eight hundred straight lines. There are more than three
hundred geometric figures UH and roughly seventy animal or plant designs.
The whole collection of drawing spans a huge area. Some
of the geometric shapes are more than six miles across,
and some of the straight lines are thirty miles long.
All together, the area that the shapes span is nearly

(04:43):
five hundred square kilometers or a hundred nineties square miles.
And just as a note on the thirty miles long one,
I have heard differing or red differing statements about the
longest line. Some listed as low as nine, some go
as high as thirty. I think there are probably some
that maybe have petered out, and it's hard to discern
for certain, So some are attributing length that may or

(05:06):
may not be attributed by other people, depending on if
it's faded, if it's uh, you know, maybe it was
one of the lines, maybe it was part of the
natural landscape, So just know that going in UH and
researchers believe that all of the designs were created using
the same methodology, so basically using wooden spades to kind
of shave or carve off the top layer of the

(05:28):
rock and expose the lighter sediment beneath. Some of the
drawings are actually carved on top of older ones, so
there was clearly a long term tradition of making these
glyphs um and that tradition might have evolved over time.
The age of the drawings and even the age of
the culture have been debated and the dates revised as

(05:48):
people keep analyzing all the evidence. It'll probably be even
further revised as time goes on. But a number that
you'll see pretty often in the research is that the
lines date back to only five hundred years, although some
newer data suggested that at least some of them are
even older than that. The UNESCO listing for the site

(06:09):
gives the date range of between five d b C
to five hundred C, and the designs are grouped into
two types. There um geoglyphs and biomorphs, and the geoglyphs
are geometric shapes and the biomorphs says you may have
guests feature animal or human shapes. Uh. In addition to
the ones that I mentioned earlier, there's also a hummingbird,

(06:30):
there's a fish, a flamingo, and iguana, a fox, a whale,
and even others. But just to keep it confusing, often
when you're looking at research, the whole group is often
lumped under the geoglyph name, rather than separating out into
those two separate geoglyph and biomorphs. Though there was some

(06:51):
archaeological work being done in Nasca in the late nineteen
twenties by a proving archaeologists who spotted some of the
designs while hiking in the nearby foothills. The lines weren't
really known of outside the area until a commercial pilot
spotted them in the thirties and sometimes UH that date
is another one that UH is a little fuzzy. In

(07:12):
resources that you'll read, some will listen as late twenties,
other in the early thirties. But once the impressive geoglyphs
were known to the outside world, almost immediately, of course,
people were trying to figure out what they were about.
Some positive that they were inking roads, some suggested that
they were irrigation lines. UH. The nearby Sarah Blanco Mountain,

(07:35):
which is technically actually a sand dune, but it's like
the largest standing in the world, I think, or ranks
up there. UH is the primary water source for the
area because of an underground reservoir, and at least one
of the triangular geoglyphs runs along the water veins that
are in that mountain. Another favorite, as is always a favorite,
everything cool. It comes up in every piece of sort

(07:57):
of difficult to explain or we have done the research
that finds the key Yet aliens aliens their alien landing
strips mostly popular in the nineteen sixties, also not particularly surprising.
It was perpetuated mostly by Eric von Danikin, who has
made a career as an author specializing in writing about

(08:18):
alien interaction with humans, especially in early cultures. Uh. Yeah,
Dannikin actually really angered one of the people who really
dedicated their lives to studying this with his theories. Uh.
And then others have applied the concept that they have
religious meaning, and there are variations on this one that
the lines are paths to rituals, or that their messages

(08:40):
to the gods, ETCETERA. American Paul Kazak, who was a
professor of history at Long Island University, is often credited
with being the first person to seriously study these lines.
His interest was really irrigation, and it was the theory
that the lines could have been complex water routing ditches
that led him to Peru. He almost immediately realized that

(09:02):
the lines were just too shallow to carry water. On
June twenty ninety one, he saw that the straight line
he was standing near pointed directly at the setting sun,
and he believed that it was a marker for the
winter solstice. In the meantime, a young woman named Maria Reicha,
who was a mathematician from Dresden, Germany and spoke five languages,

(09:23):
also started analyzing and mapping the drawings in Uh. And
she came to that because she had actually gone to
South America initially to tutor a diplomat's children, but then
started working as a translator in Lima. And it was
through her translation work that she actually met Paul kazak
Uh in Lima, and the professor really became a mentor

(09:45):
to Reicha, and once she learned the lines, it was
kind of I don't I don't want to over romanticize
it and say it was a love at first sight thing,
but she pretty quickly just decided that was her life's work. Uh.
She really devote the rest of her life to them,
and she even lived in a small desert house near
the Nasca lines to serve as their protector. So, even

(10:08):
though it's this huge expanse, this one woman kind of
out there in the desert living by herself really felt
like she had to keep a watch on everything. And
she became known as the lady of the lines, and
she actually um as I said, she lived out her
life there. She became a Peruvian citizen in at the
age of ninety one. Uh. And it was very highly regarded,

(10:29):
I think by the Peruvian people and by the government. Uh.
But her work with Kazak really in that early stage
really formed the basis for the rest of her analysis.
Right while working with him, six months after this winter
Celsist revelation, she discovered a line that pointed to the
sun during the summer solstice. This led Kassack to believe

(10:53):
that they had uncovered a celestial calendar, and he characterized
the Nasca Lines as the world's largest astronomy book. This
really reminds me of Stonehenge, and how if you stand
in certain places in Stonehenge you see specific they line
up with specific astronomical events. Yeah. It's much bigger. It's much, much,
much bigger than Stonehenge, but similarly mysterious. Yeah. Uh. And

(11:17):
in Cossack left Peru. It was not his life's work,
even though he loved it. Uh. But Maria stayed and
she continued working, and she was really attempting to find
a pattern or a system to all of the drawings,
and she spent more than forty years mapping the area,
and as part of her work, she even painstakingly restored
portions of the glyphs that had been obscured over time.

(11:39):
Some of them had accumulated duster debris, or the the
layers that had been exposed had darkened from sunlight exposure
or other elemental exposure, and she would pull those away,
never altering the glyphs, but just you know, a little
tidying and restoration. She believed that these drawings were trying

(12:00):
the sun's path and position in the sky, and that
the Nascar were using their knowledge of equinoxes to schedule
when they should plant and harvest their crops. She also
theorized that some of the glyphs were symbols correlated to
the constellations and raik working you know, as a woman
so low analyzing these phenomena. Uh, she was not taken seriously,

(12:24):
and she initially published her findings in the late forties,
shortly after Kazak left Um, and she her writings were
pretty much met with ridicule. Yeah. Competing theorists all pointed
out that the vast majority of the lines in the
glyphs did not point to any celestial bodies. Yeah, there

(12:44):
was a lot of criticism that she had, you know,
found she had kind of cherry picked a few things
that lined up with her idea and then the things
that didn't line up with She wasn't really um worried
about or working into the bigger theory. But just before
Rick had died, in one of her proteges, who was

(13:06):
a senior astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago at
the time, named Phillis B. Petluga, she actually came to
the conclusion that the bioglyphs were referring to the heavens.
She uh concluded that they aren't representing constellations but counter constellations,
so sort of the irregular shaped dark patches within the

(13:26):
milky way that you can see at night, like the
the negative space between the stars that I do too.
I looked around for a little more research on it
and didn't find a whole lot. But that's one that
I would like to delve further into because it's kind
of cool and fascinating. But that's one of those things
that I worry, uh, and I'm certainly not an astronomer.

(13:49):
I worry that that might be again one of those
things that it's easy to make work, you know what
I mean. Uh, there are so many stars in the
night sky that it would be easy to like if
you rotated a little, everything kind of fits. Or again,
I'm just postulating and I haven't looked at her research well.
And because the North Pole gradually moves over time, the

(14:11):
constellations are all in a slightly different place over time,
which also makes it challenge. But that's a really neat concept.
Now that we have all kinds of fancy computers that
can adjust for those kinds of things, it's a little easier,
but still it can be tricky that way. In there
was a big Peruvian German research collaboration that started near

(14:33):
the town of Palpa, and it has continued to study
all the lines through the years since. Archaeologist Dr Marcus
Randell of the German Archaeological Institute UH still leads a team,
but he started in the late nineteen nineties and early
two thousand's with the intent to take an in depth
look at the Peruvian Nasca lines, and their approach to

(14:55):
the lines was not so much starting with the lines
and trying to just staring their meaning, but instead they
really wanted to dig into the culture of the ancient
Nasca to try to contextualize the Nasca lines and give
a better basis for understanding their purpose. Uh. So it
definitely took a deeper archaeological uh investigation at that point.

(15:18):
I love that too, I do too. Oh, they did
some really cool stuff. Because of grave robbers, the whole
desert around this area is littered with all kinds of
broken pottery and skeletons, basically a big mess as people
have plundered Nasca burial grounds. But eighty years ago a
number of intact mummies from the Nasca land were rescued

(15:38):
and preserved. Yeah, they had been just sitting in a museum,
but Ryan Dell's research team decided that they wanted to
use modern technology to try to analyze those mummies as
part of their kind of mission to do more of
a cultural analysis. Uh. And one of the things that
was interesting is that this uh their analyzes revealed dietary
differences between some of them. These some were getting more

(16:01):
animal protein and varied diets. Uh. And around the same
time that these were going on, another part of the
team found a burial shaft for a person who obviously
had kind of a higher social standing who was adorned
with a personal shrine. And these two pieces together, the
variation in diets and the fact that they had found

(16:23):
this shrine that clearly was different from previous burial sites,
kind of locked together to lead researchers to believe that
there was in fact a social class system at play
in the Nasca culture. This is actually a pretty significant finding.
It may seem like, well, duh, every culture has a
class system and a social hierarchy, But for a long time,

(16:44):
people had believed that the ancient Nasca were a peaceful
tribe that didn't have that kind of structure. So there's
a famous ceramic tableau called the Teo Plaque, which features
multiple Nasca playing pan pipes, walking with dogs, and it
was long held this iconic representation of a relaxed tribal
life without much of a class system. Yeah. We uh,

(17:07):
you know, I think, to put it in casual terms,
I think people sort of thought of them as more
like a the hippies of history, and they were just
all cool with each other, chilling out, being groovy, enjoying
the land. So there were then some theories now that
they had established that there did appear to be a
class system that the Nasca lines might have been commanded

(17:30):
to be made by high ranking Naskins to mark their
territory or show their prestige. Geoelectric tomography, which measures the
electrical conductivity in the earth, was then used to try
to find any undiscovered buildings or other structures that might
inform this whole idea of a more socially stratified culture.

(17:51):
The researchers did find other structures, and they pieced together
that with other discoveries and eventually assembled a pretty compelling
model of how the Nasca we're actually running a pretty
successful trade empire, linking settlements and trade spots like beads
on a necklace. Yeah. At the time, Uh, and I
should say that the findings here were really expansive and

(18:13):
they could easily be their own episode. But they sort
of discovered that they could have traveled along what is
now a dry portion of the river that was leading
out to the ocean, and that they had all of
these small settlements, you know, dotting along the way so
that they could go a little trade rest, go a
little trade rest. Uh. And uh, there were again in
those findings that we're not going to dig deep into you,

(18:34):
but I at least want to acknowledge them. They found
some evidence that some of the glyphs and the structures
that we've historically attributed to the Nasca were actually pre Nasca,
and they trace it all the way back to like
the migration down into South America. But for the scope
of this one, we're gonna keep it simple with regard
to the trade culture and that sort of uh other

(18:56):
branch of the plot line of the Nasca and forcus
back on the lines. So perhaps in the future we
will do another one entirely on that, because there's some
cool stuff involving links to the Neolithic Age that had
not ever happened before. It's really really fascinating research. As
we've said already, we're talking about one of the driest

(19:17):
places on the planet. But in one small basin, which
is the area where the Nasca culture is said to
have flourished, there were at one point at least ten
rivers which descended from the Andies. Steven S Hall, writing
for National Geographic, described them pretty poetically as fragile ribbons
of green surrounded by a thousand shades of brown. So

(19:40):
most of these rivers would have each been dry for
at least part of the year. This nextus point offered
up this perfect fertile ground to support a settlement. It
also came with a really high risk because the microclimate
in that particular spot is really unstable. Any kind of
small change, like a high pressure system moving through can
comp com lately dry out the Nasca Valley. Yeah, because

(20:03):
of the way the Andes rings the area, it's easy
for um, some weather to get cut off my system
moving over at etcetera. But at one point it really
would have been an oasis. Uh, similar to other famous
spots in terms of like civilization developments, which are often

(20:24):
an oasis, you know, kind of up against the desert. Uh.
And in this oasis, we know that the Nasca grew citrus,
they grew grain, they grew maze. They had a really
impressive well structure to bring water to all these crops,
and a business built around trading some of the crops
because they were so abundant. So in two thousand seven,
German geographers took samples from the Andean Highlands where there's

(20:48):
a climate archive basically the core drill that that we
see a lot of times when we're studying long ago
facets of the earth. So the drill core revealed to
the researchers loam and even a snail, so there's proof
that there was once a lot more moisture in the area. Yeah,
the permafrost there had really preserved things for quite some times.
They were able to get a really deep sample. So

(21:11):
between then and now, when it's known for its dry climate,
we know that the water had to have left the region,
and this, in the minds of many researchers, is really
the key to understanding the Nasca lines. As more and
more excavations have been done, there's been the same imagery
that's popped up over and over on everything from everyday
tools to sacred objects, some of which have been identified

(21:35):
as likely weather deities. They look just like the earliest
rock carvings, which are mostly on the hills surrounding the area,
sort of like protectors. So as these researchers theorized more
and more droughts were happening in the desert was advancing
progressively into the Nasca plateau and really spelled out this

(21:55):
the beginning of the end for the Nasca, and the
Nasca believing that they had somehow yield the gods really
stepped up their religious rituals, including their glyphmaking. Many of
the animals that are featured in the biomorphs don't really
live near the Navska. They are found more in rainforests
on the other side of the Andes. So the current

(22:17):
theory is that these figures are fertility prayers of a sort,
asking the gods for the plenty of their neighbors, including water. Yeah,
there aren't monkeys there, but there is a monkey glyph.
There aren't certainly aren't whales there, but there is a
whale glyph. Uh. Some of the birds and other animals
that they feature do not exist there, but again, right

(22:39):
over the Andes and the rainforest they're plentiful, so it
does make some sense certainly that they would be like,
we would like what the neighbors have please. But the
geometric sites researchers think are likely actually ritual sites. And
there is a very cool project that was done where
they put together a comp puter graphics model of the

(23:02):
entire area and they developed it with information that the
researchers had provided regarding ruins and settlement structures of the time.
So it's a pretty comprehensive model of what would have
been there. And in this uh uh CG version of
the Nasca area, it shows that in fact, people could

(23:23):
have seen the glyphs from many of the buildings in
the region. Like they weren't necessarily tall, but they still
would have had a better line of sight. Uh And
this is a pretty significant break from the previous thinking
that we talked about earlier that they were only visible
from the sky. So that is, you know, a mistaken
belief that has probably led many researchers down the wrong path,

(23:44):
like um process of thought that oh, nobody could see these,
why were they making them, and how they probably could
actually see some of them. What's interesting about the geometric
designs is that they're all lockable, they're mostly on the plateau,
and this plus the revelation that you could see the
glyphs from around the area, have led researchers to theorize

(24:06):
that there were huge ritual spectacles that could be performed.
There would be sort of like putting on a show
for everyone to see, including the gods. Yeah, so kind
of um religious theatricality. And it could very well be
that the glyphs went from being pectoral to taking on
this geometric approach because at that point the Nasca were hurrying.

(24:29):
They knew that they were struggling and that they didn't
really have time for a lot of artistic flourish. So
they started focusing more on straighter lines, circles that could
be drawn inside straight lines. They didn't have to really
worry as much about mirroring images. It was more like, Okay,
we've been doing this, we're not getting the God's attention,

(24:50):
we're not gaining their favor. We have to do more
and more and more, and we don't have time for
all of the squiggles. Let's hurry, so which is kind
of sad to think about. Also an interesting approach to
this question of what these things are and why they're there.
In two thousand, Rhyndale and his team made an interesting discovery.

(25:10):
While archaeologists had noticed large man made mounds of stones
that they suspected were ceremonial altars at the end of
the trapezoidal glyphs before an excavation of one of them
revealed fragments of a spondylist muscle seashell. This particular muscle
is only found off the coast of Peru during El

(25:30):
Nino events. This would have tied it to rainfall in
the minds of the Nascar, So the shells found at
some of these alt sites might have been offerings to
the gods from the sea to encourage water. And this
theory of water warship and request of the gods is
also supported by the growing size of the geoglyphs in
the later period of the ancient Nasca culture as they

(25:52):
grew more desperate as I was talking about before, they
would have wanted everyone in their villages and settlements to
participate in the water rituals. So even uh, the spiral
lines and some of the geometric glyphs, if they were
walking them the way these researchers are suggesting as part
of their ritual, it would have forced the worshippers to

(26:15):
face one another over and over, kind of like if
you've ever been through like a long queue in an
amusement park and you keep seeing the same people back
and forth. Uh, and it it would have as they
moved through their steps kind of reinforce their sense of
community and potentially strengthened their resolve to plead for the gods,
for their favorite for the good of everyone like they were.
Potentially this is one theory of course kind of reinforcing

(26:38):
that idea that we all need to survive together, so
we all need to be doing this. By five hundred
to six hundred, the end of the Nasca was near.
The water issue would have really been insurmountable at this point,
And we know that by six fifty the Nasca had
been replaced by the Way Empire, which had its roots
in the Central Highlands. Yes, so since they weren't exclusive

(27:00):
of Lee in this super dry area, they kind of
had a stronger um cultural presence that they could branch out,
but they always had that kind of more hospitable environment
to return to you. And so, while there isn't enough
evidence to definitively prove any of these theories, the celestial
theory or certainly not the alien landing strip theory or

(27:23):
even these sort of pretty well thought out water and
God related theories, uh, the current frontrunner among researchers, given
what we've been able to uncover, does seem to be
the religious ritual usage as a means to try to
save the culture. So to sort of wrap it up,
the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization better known

(27:46):
as UNESCO put the NASCAR GIOG lifts on the World
Heritage List in and as I mentioned earlier, Maria Rika
died in June at the age of four years after
the lines were added to UNESCO's list, and there was
talk at the time of her death that the lines
should be named the Reicha Lines, but it appears that
idea never really gained any traction. I would like to

(28:08):
vote against that, please. I think it would be too
problematic for the historical record at this point. Yeah. Well,
and I also think I sort of feel like the
name of the culture that made them should be preserved
there and not replaced with some other person. They have
also been new figures discovered through the years, so even
though Maria Reiko was very thorough and dedicated to the lines,

(28:31):
there have been advances in photography that have revealed some
glyphs that were previously really hard to make out. Yeah,
she mapped the vast majority of them, but they still
do sometimes discover them. And while the Nasca Lines are
not the only such g glyphs on Earth, they are
perhaps the most famous. UH And even now there's a
significant tourism trade built around carrying people out to the

(28:53):
desert UH for aerial tours to see these massive landscape
carvings from the past. It just kind of neat. I
would like to go stuff in Peru. Yeah, delicious food
even beyond the food. How my tourism is based entirely
around what I can eat in different places. Uh. But yeah,

(29:14):
they's amazing amazing archaeology and amazing amazing ancient culture. Yeah, preserved. Yeah,
and it is one of those things where, like I
said at the top, I think most people have probably
seen pictures of these and maybe even heard a little
bit about them, But when you realize how much research
has been dedicated to them. I mean, even in doing this,

(29:37):
there are so many archaeologists that we can't sort of
step aside and talk about their individual work, so we
focused on kind of the big ones. But there's just
people are really enthralled by them. And Maria Reiche is
not the only person who pretty much dedicated her entire ah,
she dedicated her entire life. Other people, many people dedicate

(29:58):
their careers to them. So it's they're engaging. I like them.
I would love to walk them all well. And the
fact that so many people have dedicated their lives to
trying to puzzle out the mysteries of what these ancient
sites were all about. Um makes it seem really silly
that occasionally, like governments will come up with this cookie

(30:19):
plan about what to do with nuclear waste and say,
well if we market with these things, that will deter people.
Like Okay, Now, in a thousand years, people are probably
not going to be deterred. They're going to be walking
around and trying to figure out what that was about. Yeah, well,
and there is even am I thought about that a
little bit while doing research. The big lizard glyph actually

(30:41):
had its bisected by a highway that was built. I
think it was that the that highway was worked on
in Peru. And I wonder if you know, years and
years and years from now, someone will look and be like,
why was the lizard cutting ham And it's like, oh,
I was really not part of the origin old plan.
But they won't know that Nope, or maybe they'll figure

(31:03):
it out archaeology. It's so cool. Guess what. I also
have listener mail. Please tell me what it says this
time I now made us both smiles so big. Uh.
It is from our listener Angela, and she says, I
wanted to tell you first how much I enjoy your
podcasts I listened on my drive to and from work
each day at the public library. Uh and I love

(31:25):
that you cover topics that have had a significant impact
on our lives, but are just too narrow to be
taught in a normal high school or college level history course.
I am an amateur culinary historian. This is where I
leaned forward a little bit while I was reading. We
got really excited. So your recent episode on ice cream
was a real treat for me, she quoted treats. After

(31:45):
listening to it, I decided to cook three vintage ice
cream recipes, vanilla, strawberry, and corn flake from books in
my collection. You can see the results of my blog
and maybe try the recipes at home if you like.
The vanilla and strawberry were out of this world, and
the corn flake is interesting. Okay, I will go on
record the corn flake sounded the best to me. Yeah,
well and we um we we being me. I put

(32:08):
a link to that on our Facebook and Twitter, to
the cornflake one in particular, just because I feel like
John Harvey Kellogg is rolling over in his grave that
someone made ice cream out of corn flate is healthy,
I know, out of his thing. That was all about
not having dairy or sugar, meat or any of this
other delicious stuff, and it was all about eating like fairy,
bland things. But yeah, it makes me super happy that

(32:30):
there's corn flake ice cream. I for sure want to
try the corn flake ice cream recipe because it does
sound really yell me to me. Yeah. Well, and I
think she said later and Anna follow up that it
tastes sort of like frozen corn flakes. Yeah. I reading
her blog about it. I think she said I don't
have it in front of me, that it tasted more
interesting before it froze, but when it froze, it lost

(32:51):
some of its kind of spices and um, more individual flavors,
and that's when it started to just taste like frozen
corn flakes. I'm fascinated. I'm in and one to make it.
When you find me passed out diabetic shock from eating
all the corpl like ice cream, you'll know what happened.
I'll probably have to smile on my face. I've been
really sad when that happened. I hope that doesn't happen.
We try to eat well most of the time so

(33:12):
that we can indulge in the CORNFLA. So thank you
Angela because you have inspired me in the kitchen. I
love the idea of being a culinary historian. Yes. Well,
and we occasionally get all kinds of people who are
doing blogs of historical recipes and things, and occasionally when
we talk about what kind of video series we can do,
we talk about some kind of historical cooking show. Yeah.

(33:35):
All the food stuff makes us really happy, of course,
because this food is great. We we've already been talking
today about what's for lunch and we still have more
episodes to record. Yeah, it's really all about food here.
Uh So, if you would like to write to us
and share risk, fees are thoughts, you can do so
at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can also
touch base with us on Twitter atmost in history, on

(33:58):
Facebook dot com slash history class stuff, or on Tumbler
at mist in history dot tumbler dot com. We also
have a board on pictests, which includes I pinned at
one point Thomas Jefferson's vanilla ice cream recipe, although I
think it's hard to make out the details to actually
use it because it's handwritten and it's quite an elderly piece.
It's a photograph of the original document. Uh if you

(34:19):
would like to learn a little bit about something we
touched on in today's podcast, if you can go to
our website and search the word UNESCO and it will
turn up what is a World Heritage site, so you'll
get more of a sense of how those are selected
uh and made into official sites. If you would like
to research almost anything else in your mind you can
think of, you can do so at our website. And

(34:40):
that website is how Stop works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has
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