Who discovered the Sajama Lines?
Of course the local people of the region have known about the lines since they were built. The earliest account of the Sajama Lines in English is a brief reference by traveler Aimé Felix Tschiffely in 1932 which states: “They [the native peoples] are very fond of building little chapels on the very tops of hills or mountains that happen to overlook their villages and settlements, and the trails that lead up to these shrines are invariably absolutely straight and very steep, so steep in fact that a white man would find it difficult to reach the top” (1932:440). Anthropologist Alfred Metraux brought the lines and associated alignments of shrines to the attention of scholars when he published ethnographic fieldwork done in 1931 of the Chipaya and Aymara of the Carangas region. He described local cone shaped earth shrines called “mallku” and small chapels distributed across the landscape up to 10 km from the settlements. He added that the shrines were connected by “roads that lead in absol
