Some parts of Peru haven't seen rain for centuries.

But that doesn't mean it's not without life or wildlife.

Crossing a desert on the Pan-American Highway can be half the fun.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.

Along the southern coast of Peru is absolute desert, the driest in the world.

Generations have never seen rain.

Still people have managed to eek out a living for eons.

I'm traveling there with a couple of friends including Argentine archaeologist Axel Nielsen.

The longest highway in the world stretches from Alaska in the north to the southern tip of Chile, twelve-thousand miles of Pan-American Highway.

This stretch in Peru doesn't need much maintenance since it never rains.

It's fairly new but it follows the route used for millennia by people of the coastal desert.

Everybody that comes to Peru comes to Machu Picchu, right?

Yeah.

Exactly.

Most people come to Peru don't go south along the Pan-America Highway, they go to where the jungle's green.

We go to where there are no plants and there's a thousand miles of gaping desert without any sign of life that you can see.

There's life there of course.

Yeah, it's so bad that people don't come here because this is such a different experience.

I don't think that you can see places like this anywhere else in the world.

Look at this landscape.

It's a Martian landscape.

This may be the driest desert in the world but it happens to lie where a couple hundred miles to the east are the Andes Mountains.

They pick up a lot of rain.

When the heavy rains come, it runs off into these verdant valleys and makes possible abundant crops such as the ancient aboriginal Inca cotton.

I've been around cotton all my life.

I even picked cotton as a kid.

Our plants in Arizona, they don't get much more than three feet tall and this stuff, look, it gets up to nine, probably ten feet tall.

I've never seen anything like it.

And in fact cotton began to be grown here five thousand years ago.

It was one of the first crops to be planted here, which is interesting because culture was not adapted for food and staples but for cotton.

For fiber, for nets for fishing.

So our culture was at the service of marine exploitation.

That's amazing.

I mean, this is like a forest of cotton plants.

Because apparently the old world cotton and the new world cotton are different plants.

So it was independent and domesticated on both continents from wild ancestors that were widespread all over the world.

So in fact this cotton has very long fibers so it's much better quality than the old world cotton.

It may never rain on the land but the ocean is teeming with life.

We can see it up close on the Ballestas Island.

Well, this is a launch, the boat that takes us to Ballestas.

Buenos dias, Capitan.

Here we can see adult and juvenile sea lions.

They are permanent residents both to the south and north and to the island of Chinchas.

These animals are always here due to the abundance of fish found in these waters.

You can see another penguin above the rocks just in that little crevice, you would see the white breast on it.

Here on the Ballestas Islands we have many resident bird populations including some that are also found around the coast such as the common booby, three different species of cormorants, the red-footed cormorant, black one and the black one with a white breast.

Other birds include Peruvian seagulls, Dominican seagulls and condors that come to these islands from the desert.

These islands, the Islas Ballestas are protected and that's good.

It's a marine reserve.

Except for the exploitation of guano and you don't have to have a real sensitive nose to know that there are a few million birds pooping regularly for a few million years and producing vast amounts of dung.

You can smell it from miles away.

It makes great fertilizer.

The reason there's such an amazing abundance of wildlife on this Islas Ballestas just off the shore of Peru, is because the water here is very cold.

It's the Humboldt Current coming up from Antarctica.

With the cold water, it holds oxygen in and it means that there's ample oxygen to create vast amounts of green life.

There's enough food for millions and millions of birds on this island and a couple thousand sea lions.

They seem to do quite well with the richest sea life in the world.

But if you go inland, off the shore, into the desert, it never rains.

It never rains because this water is too cold to allow any evaporation to reach inland.

This water is rich and because it is rich the desert is dry.

Without the cold Humboldt Current, there's no desert and if there were no Humboldt Current, there wouldn't be all this wildlife and there wouldn't be a desert.

This drawing in the sand is known as a candelabra.

One idea is that it represents the San Pedro cactus and was created by the Paracas culture.

Another theory is that the Nascans who would have come here from the south did this figure.

The traditional economic mainstay of the Paracas was based on fishing, while the Nascans was based on agriculture.

Another theory is that the Catholic priest Ramon Rojas engineered this figure.

That's why it's referred to as candelabra, a symbol of Catholicism.

Paracas is also a word used to describe an incredible sand storm.

This symbol is interpreted as a miracle, a coming of these sand storms.

But the true meaning of this creation will always remain a mystery.

No one will ever know.

The depiction of the San Pedro cactus is six hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide.

The cactus is hallucinogenic and played a huge role in ancient cultures.

Unfortunately, our driver Alejandro informs us we won't see it growing along the Pan-American Highway.

But there's plenty else to see.

Peru has three very distinct regions; the coast, the mountain range and the Amazon jungle.

Ninety percent of our six hundred mile journey from Lima is through pure desert.

Along the way we will occasionally find small river valleys and a few oasis, nothing more.

It is extremely dry and desert like.

There's a vigorous international disagreement between Mexico and Peru as to in which country the Prickly Pear originated.

I won't try to settle that argument but we know that before the arrival of the Spaniards, the cochineal, which is a small organism that grows on the prickly pear, gave a powerful scarlet to Indigo dye.

Today Peru is the largest producer of cochineal in the world.

It's now replacing a lot of chemical dyes because it's a powerful color and when dyed property, garments with it will stay dyed for ever.

This lumber yard on the main drag of Chincha, they sell these piles of esteras.

This is a pre-fabricated house.

Yeah, this is a whole pack of them.

Yeah, you can probably build a whole room with this, huh?

You know, arid climate like this, there's not a whole lot of stuff to make buildings out of.

No.

You know in early pre-historic times, say more than five thousand years ago, all the houses were made with these reeds which are called huncos.

Huncos.

Yeah, they build mats and they use these mats as wells and roofs for the houses.

That's all you find in these archaeological sites, just middens and you know if you're lucky in this arid climate, sometimes its reed will preserve.

So archaeologists find this.

So in these like large cities, say two thousand years ago, you find like the temples were made with adobe and all the commoner houses around were still made of these reed mats.

So the three earliest plants that were cultivated on the coast of Peru were reeds, this for construction, cotton for nets and gourds to make floats for the nets and carry water.

So they were cultivating these certain industrial crops before they had any food problem.

Exactly.

So they have this two thousand year long period, which is called the cotton pre-ceramic, which is a time when they ever culture but they didn't adopt pottery because they were not eating every cultural product so they needed to boil them.

You see.

So they lived off the sea and they brew things that would help them harvest from the sea.

Well, this is not like any lumber yard I've ever been in the United States.

This is big bamboo.

Yeah, I've seen people use them for houses.

They grow in big rows.

They grow up to twenty feet a year.

And they get, my goodness, they get a foot in diameter.

They're extremely strong.

Stronger than any coniferous tree so it's perfect lumber.

And they grow so fast they can harvest them and they're perfect for a dry climate.

And this will float as well.

You can see it's, with good balance you can raise these high.

This is very, this is almost as strong as steel, pound for pound.

I think they should give a prize for whoever can hold this longest without falling over.

I think the record's eight hours and seventeen minutes.

A stop in the town of Ica introduces us to new forms of transportation that help us explore its famous dunes.

How many times have you ridden in a moto-taxi?

I think only once in India.

In India?

Well.

Yeah.

.I never had because I've never been to India.

I guess they've had these only seven years and he said in the last two years it just exploded.

Everybody has them.

But they're only along the coast where it's warm and doesn't rain.

Yeah.

It wouldn't work in the highland cities I guess.

Oh, no.

Too hilly.

Yeah, they're not.

These are not five hundred horse power engines.

Not at all.

Yeah, this is basically a rickshaw with an engine in it.

Well, what a kick.

Yeah, and a I think if it were to rain, this would be a disaster or in cold weather you'd die.

Yeah.

You get a lot of wind in this, which is actually nice here in the desert.

You know it's as comfortable as most cars.

Yeah.

It's great.

It actually is very pleasant.

And you know you can get great views.

Now the mountains up ahead we're looking at must be say four thousand meters high.

So here we are in dune fields at the base of, oh, fourteen thousand foot high, fourteen-fifteen thousand foot high mountains.

Most nations print on their currency things that are of great importance to them and Peru is no exception.

On their fifty sol note worth about fifteen dollars they have a representation of the Oasis of Ica.

An oasis like this one at Ica, there's nothing like certainly for a hundred miles.

Yeah, that's right.

The old-timers, that is people for thousands of years, must have known about it.

You know, they haven't found any archaeological remains in this area.

And this oasis, I mean, although they have found spectacular things in Paracas or Nasca nearby.

So I wonder if this oasis was in place thousands of years ago.

Because I can't imagine pre-historic people wouldn't make use of this water in the middle of these deserts.

And they'd bring their stuff here for sure.

It could be that the whole oasis I moving.

So maybe a pre-historic occupation would be buried under the dune?

Dunes do move.

And they can sometimes move thirty, forty feet a year and they have to go somewhere.

This means that these buildings and trees we see now around the lake, could be buried by the dune in say a hundred years, thousand years.

I would think they'd want to get good insurance policies because wherever there are dunes that are active, they move and they can move fairly quickly.

It moves you right up here.

Once advantage to these, you know they can do a lot of damage to this vegetation.

There's no vegetation here to damage.

The wind covers up all wounds here so I don't think it does any harm at all.

Around Ica we have about fourteen lagoons.

In Juacachina we have all these beautiful sand dunes that we call the California Desert where you can have a truly off-road experience with sand buggies and ATVs.

This natural beauty is part of our Peruvian landscape, the lagoons and sand dunes of Juacachina.

So how long do you figure human beings have been stomping around in these dunes?

Well, there are evidence of presence of human populations here for nine thousands years.

Nine thousand years.

Nine thousand years going back to the end of the glacier age.

For the first five thousand years they depended mostly on the sea resources.

They would exploit shellfish and other resources they could find at the coast.

It's only like five thousand years ago and partly due to population growth for instance, they started depending more on terrestrial resources, business, agriculture and the riverboats.

Far away from the dunes, remote from the Pan-American Highway, and set apart from any life-giving water, ancient people found pure desert, the perfect place to express their artistic and spiritual creations.

Today, this vast collection of art is called Toro Muerto.

Toro Muerto which literally means dead bull is one of the largest rock art sites in the south of Peru.

There are literally hundreds of boulders engraved with figures, both geometric and animals, humans and animals, all of them terrestrial animals, like snakes or llamas or terrestrial birds like condors for instance.

Archaeologists have attributed the petroglyphs of Toro Muerto to the time between 1000 A.D. and the arrival of the Incas, this is in the 1400s.

These rocks have to be a solidified volcanic ash.

Yes, that's what they look like.

Who knows where the source was.

It probably bombed in here from a long way away.

I think, looking at this, wherever you see the figures back there and over here for instance, they're on the patina which is the weathered side, kind of reddish, but it's not always up.

So that patina was in existence before the big bang blew these rocks down here.

So the ashes were weathered before they landed here.

The ash was from a different eruption, weather and then got blown down here and was just waiting to be carved.

Is it possible that more than one people or culture left their designs on these rocks?

It's very possible in this five hundred year period several cultures sort of added their own ingredient to the site.

And certainly if you look at the variety of motifs that have been engraved, that seems to be like different hands on the site.

Yeah, different hands and all these different sharp designs, round designs, almost as if different mindsets were involved in it.

Yeah, after you see a few hundred of these, themes start coming through and then you get a little bit dizzy These anthropomorphs, they're really a congo line.

Yeah, they look just like the ones we saw over there.

Yeah, you'd be surprised how popular the congo lines were back in the 13th century up here.

It is very common that the rock art sites in the southern Andes, this is northern Chile and southern Peru, are located in very arid places near irrigated valleys in areas of agricultural production but in a separate location.

And this and the prevalence of the llama motif in some of these sites have led some archaeologists to suggest that they might be associated with llama caravans.

This is with the trades between the highlands and the lowlands.

If you contrast this iconography in Toro Muerto with Nasca, which is located in a similar context a little further north from here, in Nasca you have all these marine representations, which suggests that Nasca people were related to the sea.

None of these designs were anything that took a lot of time.

I mean these were not.

Oh, no.

They're real expedient.

They're real expedient.

So somebody, "Okay, hey, we're gonna rest for a day, let's go up and leave a sign for the Pacha Mama on."

Well, even the concept of calling them rock art, you know it's a very western concept.

Yeah.

I mean these were not art in the sense of pleasant aesthetic sort of experiences but they had different meanings for these cultures, or engravings or representations.

Toro Muerto is located near the Valley of Majés some fifteen miles east of the Pacific coast.

The Valley of Majés, which is part of the Colca Valley, is one of the main routes that connects the highlands to the coast.

And this gives the idea that Toro Muerto could be related to this traffic between the highlands and the coast that we know from other kinds of evidence that was taking place at the time.

One of the animals that is most commonly represented in Toro Muerto is the llama and this lends support to the idea that the site could be related indeed to a llama caravan between the highlands and the lowlands.

Take this one for instance.

Look at all the llamas here.

Man, it's covered, it's covered with llamas.

Yeah.

How come that one has that long, long tail?

Well, that could be a way of representing the trail that the llama is walking along.

Yeah, if somebody was really tired and say, "Man, this is a drawn out trip.

Exactly, just to show the llamas moving along the trail.

Why the cross here?

It looks like it's been more recently put on there.

Yeah, that's right.

And you know that happens a lot in these kind of sites.

The priests in the early times of the conquest would enter this fight against idolatry so they would sort of kill the power of these ceremonial ancient sites by drawing crosses on top of them.

Kind of like that old thing where if you see the devil, you hold out a cross and the devil explodes and is gone.

Exactly.

It's like exorcism.

The Peruvian desert may be the driest in the world and it's barren.

A lot of sand, plenty of rocks, very few plants.

For us, though, it's not desolate and for those ancient peoples that managed to survive, it was their home.

In the high altitude desert of South America, it's not hard to find evidence of the famed Inca Civilization.

It's in the countryside, the cities.and along the most dangerous road in the world.

But if you know where to look, you can find remains of elaborate civilizations that were ancient even before the arrival of the Incas.

Join us next time on the Desert Speaks.

The driver was saying they put a lot of little small microbuses, put them out of business because these are so popular.

They're very cheap and they're mobile, they can move through traffic real quickly.

Yeah, but he also said that a lot of people that didn't have a job, now have a little means of making a living.

Create more employment, yeah.

And it looks like, this looks to me as though it's a marijuana leaf design.

I wonder if that's an indicator of popular culture.

Exactly.

It says rasta .

It says rasta , that's right.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.