Gouged into a barren stretch of pampa in southern Peru, the Nazca Lines are one of archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries. On the floor of the coastal desert, the shallow markings look like simple furrows. But from the air, hundreds of feet up, they morph into trapezoids, spirals and zigzags in some locations, and stylized hummingbirds and spiders in others. There is even a cat with the tail of a fish. Thousands of lines jump cliffs and traverse ravines without changing course; the longest is bullet-straight and extends for more than 15 miles.
The vast incisions were brought to the world’s attention in the mid-1920s by a Peruvian scientist who spotted them while hiking through the Nazca foothills. Over the next decade, commercial pilots passing over the region revealed the enormousness of the artwork, which is believed to have been created from 200 B.C. to 700 A.D. by a civilization that predated the Inca.
“It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative geoglyphs,” said Masato Sakai, an archaeologist at Yamagata University in Japan who has studied the lines for 30 years.
Dr. Sakai is the lead author of a survey published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found 303 previously uncharted geoglyphs in only six months, almost doubling the number that had been mapped as of 2020. The researchers used artificial intelligence in tandem with low-flying drones that covered some 243 square miles. Their conclusions also provided insights into the symbols’ enigmatic purpose.
The newly found images — an average of 30 feet across — could have been detected in past flyovers if the pilots had known where to look. But the pampa is so immense that “finding the needle in the haystack becomes practically impossible without the help of automation,” said Marcus Freitag, an IBM physicist who collaborated on the project.
To identify the new geoglyphs, which are smaller than earlier examples, the investigators used an application capable of discerning the outlines from aerial photographs, no matter how faint. “The A.I. was able to eliminate 98 percent of the imagery,” Dr. Freitag said. “Human experts now only need to confirm or reject plausible candidates.”
That 2 percent flagged by A.I. amounted to 47,410 potential sites from the desert plain. Dr. Sakai’s team then pored over the high-resolution photos and narrowed the field to 1,309 candidates. “These were then categorized into three groups based on their potential, allowing us to predict their likelihood of being actual geoglyphs before visiting,” Dr. Sakai said.
Two years ago the researchers started scouting the more promising locations by foot and with drones, ultimately “ground-truthing” 303 geoglyphs. Among the depictions were plants, people, snakes, monkeys, cats, parrots, llamas and a grisly tableau of a knife-wielding orca severing a human head. Of the new figures, 244 were suggested by the technology, while the other 59 were identified during the fieldwork unaided by A.I.
The Nazca people carved the designs into the earth by scraping back the pebbled, rust-colored surface to expose the yellow-gray subsoil. Little is known about the shadowy culture, which left no written record. Aside from the etchings, pretty much all that exists of the civilization are pieces of pottery and an ingenious, still functioning irrigation network.
The ancient geoglyphs have attracted theories that range from the religious (they were homages to powerful mountain and fertility gods) to the environmental (they were astronomical guides to predict infrequent rains in the nearby Andes) to the fantastical (they were landing strips and parking lots for alien spacecraft).
Dr. Sakai said that geoglyphs were drawn near pilgrimage routes to temples, which implies that they functioned as sacred spaces for community rituals, and could be considered planned, public architecture. The newly discovered geoglyphs are mainly located along a network of trails that wound through the pampa. They were most likely made by individuals and small groups to share information about rites and animal husbandry.
Though the archaeological site is a restricted and protected area, the lines have been threatened by occasional vandalism. In 2014, Greenpeace activists left footprints near the colossal hummingbird geoglyph during a protest aimed at United Nations climate talks delegates in Lima. Four years later, three geoglyphs were damaged when a truck driver reportedly avoided a toll by plowing a rig through the sand.
Dr. Sakai said that markings in spots subject to flash floods and mudslides are particularly vulnerable. When those geoglyphs “are partially destroyed by flowing water, it becomes challenging to determine their original shapes,” he said.
Of the original 1,309 candidates, Dr. Sakai estimates that there are at least another 500 undetected figures.
“I expect that more surprising facts will emerge,” he said.
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