Across the rocky coastal desert of Southern Peru are hundreds of mysterious lines that criss cross the terrain and draw tourists and sightseers from around the globe. Yet just five miles southeast of the town are more fascinating, complex and unexplainable works by these same people that often go completely unnoticed.

The Cantallo aqueducts near the city have more than a dozen ‘ventanas’ or ‘windows’ to the underground water system - giant rock-lined spirals that burrow into the ground and reveal the clear flowing waters that are still used today to irrigate the local fields.

The Nazca culture surged from about 100 B.C. to 600 A.D. when it was overwhelmed by the growing might of the Incas. In his book on the history of Peru, Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes, historian Peter Flindell Klarén describes the environment of the Nazca in blunt terms:

“Water was scarce, droughts were common, and much of its main river ran underground, leading the Nazca to devise an ingenious underground filtration system to tap the water table.”

The Nazca are not an anomaly, pretty much every major culture that emerged in Peru did so on their strengths as engineers.

In his recent bestseller, “1491” author Charles C. Mann brought attention to the discoveries at Chico Norte on the Peruvian coast north of Lima. Archeologists are currently excavating a municipal complex that emerged as early as 3500 B.C.

“On a world level, the eruption at the Norte Chico was improbable, even aberrant. The Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys were fertile, sunny, well-water breadbaskets with long stretches of bottomland that practically invited farmers to stick seeds in the soil…The Peruvian littoral is an agronomical no-go zone: barren, cloudy, almost devoid of rain, seismically and climatically unstable.”

So how did a complex society emerge so early – roughly on par with ancient Sumer – in such a barren place? Mann airs the theory that these settlements were the result of the creation of government; a spontaneous emergence of leaders “with enough prestige, influence, and hierarchical position to induce their subjects to perform heavy labor.”

But others, including noted Peruvian archeologist Guillermo Cock, suggest the organization was due to another invention that preceded it – engineering.

“It’s simply amazing,” he said. “The examples we have from early settlements of up to 6,500 years ago you have examples of relatively sophisticated engineering.”

The reason is that Peru has a secret weapon – one of the most abundant seacoasts in the world. The cold waters of the Humboldt Current push north from the Antarctic and collide with the warm waters of the South Pacific, providing an abundance of seafood.

The high reaches of the Andes block precipitation that rolls across the great Amazon basin and the cold air from the seas erases moisture even further. In many portions of the coastline, years without rainfall are not uncommon. Driving across much of it you get a good sense of the expression ‘moonscape.’

Yet put water on this earth and it can be astonishingly fertile. And many of Peru’s ancient cultures emerged along the waterways that roll out of the mountains bringing cold glacier water to the coast. But not all.

With the largess from the sea providing their nutritional needs, growing groups of people had to meet a different requirement for their survival – drinking water. And that, instead of agriculture, pushed them to become engineers.

“Once your population begins to grow you have to provide for it. There is very little drinking water on the coast so fresh water has to be brought here. The need to build irrigation forced them to organize,” Cock explained.

Then the cultures are primed and ready to go when agriculture becomes necessary. The initiation of engineering works has them starting to organize a society and gives them expertise for more ambitious works when the need should arrive. They are pre-conditioned to jump start to an actual civilization when the right crop arrives, which it did with maize.

“The next step,” Cock explains, “Is buildings.”