{"it":{"id":"ART008","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","name":"Nazca geoglyphs","place":"in situ (UNESCO)","date":"500 BC - AD 500","mat":"desert pavement (cleared stones)","dims":"figures to hundreds of m","loc":"in situ (UNESCO)","acc":"in situ (UNESCO)","flag":"genuine ancient","src":[145,146,361],"tags":[],"sum":"In six months of fieldwork, a team from Yamagata University in Japan confirmed 303 new figurative geoglyphs on the Nazca plateau of Peru. Until then 430 were known, so the survey nearly doubled the count.\n\nThe lines were found in the 1920s and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They were made at least 2,000 years ago. The team, working with IBM Research, trained an AI model on aerial images. It flagged 1,309 likely sites, which the researchers screened at about 1 in 36 before walking the ground, a process they say was 16 times faster than looking unaided. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2024.\n\nWhat remains hard to explain is why there are two kinds. Large line-type figures mostly show wild animals. Small relief-type figures mostly show people and domesticated camelids.\n\nThe team proposes an answer. The line figures sit near networks used for community ritual, while the relief figures line footpaths and could be seen only by individuals or small groups, like billboards. The open questions are about use and meaning, not about who made them.\n\nIf hundreds of figures stayed hidden until 2024, how many are still out there?","why":"An AI-assisted survey found 303 new Nazca figures and a pattern in where they sit.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":3,"yt":"Check the survey's detection method.","rel":["SAM-011"],"hook":"An AI survey found 303 new Nazca figures in six months, nearly doubling the count."},"S":{"145":["doi.org","https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2407652121"],"146":["doi.org","https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105777"],"361":["Wikipedia: Nazca lines","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines"]},"rec":{"id":"ART008","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[{"a":"find_circumstances","r":"not in staged/legacy artifact record (free sources)"}],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA087","a":"Landing strips / signals for sky beings","who":"popular AA literature/TV","main":"Ritual pathways; 303 new figurative glyphs found with AI; small relief glyphs near trails, line glyphs tied to ritual networks","ms":"https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2407652121 ; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105777","st":"contradicted","n":"status from artifacts row; no new lab rows this batch","nl":1}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"art":{"claimed_anomaly":"Landing strips / signals for sky beings","mainstream_reading":"Ritual pathways; 303 new figurative glyphs found with AI; small relief glyphs near trails, line glyphs tied to ritual networks","provenance_flag":"genuine ancient","current_location":"","find_circumstances":"","claimant":"","status":"","dimensions":"figures to hundreds of m","material":"desert pavement (cleared stones)","date":"500 BC - AD 500","culture":"Nazca (Peru)","museum_accession":"in situ (UNESCO)","b":"V","s":[]},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"S0058","t":"doi.org","u":"https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2407652121"},{"id":"S0048","t":"doi.org","u":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2023.105777"},{"id":"S0555","t":"Wikipedia: Nazca lines","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines"},{"id":"VART008-4","t":"Yamagata University (2024): AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles known figurative geoglyphs","u":"https://www.yamagata-u.ac.jp/en/information/info/20240924/"},{"id":"VART008-5","t":"PNAS (2024), DOI 10.1073/pnas.2407652121","u":"https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407652121"}],"qs":["If hundreds of figures stayed hidden until 2024, how many are still out there?","Why would a people make some figures for crowds and others for a single walker?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca%2C_Nazca%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-29%2C_DD_49.JPG/1280px-L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca%2C_Nazca%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-29%2C_DD_49.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca,_Nazca,_Per%C3%BA,_2015-07-29,_DD_49.JPG","title":"Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 49.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Diego Delso","cap":"Aerial view of the \"Monkey\", one of the most popular geoglyphs of the Nazca Lines, which are located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. The geoglyphs of this"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/04-Nazca_Lines-nX-36.jpg/1280px-04-Nazca_Lines-nX-36.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:04-Nazca_Lines-nX-36.jpg","title":"04-Nazca Lines-nX-36.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"PsamatheM","cap":"The Parrot (Nazca Lines)"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/04-Nazca_Lines-nX-54.jpg/1280px-04-Nazca_Lines-nX-54.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:04-Nazca_Lines-nX-54.jpg","title":"04-Nazca Lines-nX-54.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"PsamatheM","cap":"The Tree, The Lizard and Viewing Tower & Pan-American Highway (Nazca Lines)"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/04-Nazca_Lines-nX-58.jpg/1280px-04-Nazca_Lines-nX-58.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:04-Nazca_Lines-nX-58.jpg","title":"04-Nazca Lines-nX-58.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"PsamatheM","cap":"The Spiral (Nazca Lines)"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cd/L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca%2C_Nazca%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-29%2C_DD_39.JPG/1280px-L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca%2C_Nazca%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-29%2C_DD_39.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca,_Nazca,_Per%C3%BA,_2015-07-29,_DD_39.JPG","title":"Líneas de Nazca, Nazca, Perú, 2015-07-29, DD 39.JPG","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Diego Delso","cap":"Aerial view of the \"Whale\", one of the geoglyphs of the Nazca Lines, which are located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. The geoglyphs of this UNESCO World ","alt":"Aerial view of the \"Whale\", one of the geoglyphs of the Nazca Lines, which are located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. The geoglyphs of this UNESCO World"}],"sum":"Walk out onto the desert floor of southern Peru and you might step straight over one without knowing it. The ground is a skin of reddish-brown pebbles, darkened by iron oxide and baked for centuries. Here and there a shallow trench runs through them, no deeper than your hand is wide, where someone long ago lifted the dark stones aside and left the pale, yellow-grey earth beneath exposed. Follow the trench and it bends. Follow it further and it curls back on itself. Only from a hill, or from the air, does the shape come together: a bird, a monkey, a spider, a creature the size of a city block, drawn in a single unbroken line.\n\nThese are the Nazca lines, and for most of a century the world thought it knew roughly how many there were. Then, in 2024, a team of archaeologists and an artificial intelligence nearly doubled the count of the figures in six months.\n\nThe lines lie in the Nazca Desert, on a high, dry plain the Japanese researchers call the Nasca Pampa, which covers some 400 square kilometres. They were made between about 500 BC and AD 500, over two main phases: an earlier Paracas phase from about 400 to 200 BC, and the Nazca phase from about 200 BC to AD 500. Most of the lines run dead straight across the landscape. Laid end to end they would stretch more than 1,300 kilometres, across a total area of about 50 square kilometres. They are typically only 10 to 15 centimetres deep, and many are about a third of a metre wide. Among them are the figures: more than 70 animal designs in the long-known set, including a hummingbird, a spider, a monkey, a condor, a heron, a lizard and a human, the largest about 370 metres long. They are best seen from around 500 metres up. Because the plateau is so dry, so stable and so still, the lines have survived largely by the climate alone. UNESCO made them a World Heritage Site in 1994.\n\nTheir modern story begins with a glance. In 1553 the Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León mentioned them as trail markers. In the twentieth century, Peruvian pilots were the first to report them, and in 1927 the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe noticed them while hiking in the foothills. The American historian Paul Kosok came to Peru in 1940 and 1941 to study ancient irrigation, flew over the lines, and realised that one of them was a bird. Another chance observation showed him lines converging on the horizon at the southern winter solstice. With the German mathematician and archaeologist Maria Reiche he proposed that the lines marked where the sun and other bodies rose on important days. In 1990, though, the archaeoastronomers Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni concluded that the evidence was not strong enough to support that reading.\n\nBy the time of the AI survey, 430 figurative geoglyphs were known, the drawings of animals, plants and objects rather than straight lines. Yamagata University's Institute of Nasca had found 318 of them itself, using satellites, aircraft and drones. But a desert of 400 square kilometres is too big to walk and too big to examine photograph by photograph. So in partnership with IBM Research the team built an AI model able to learn from only a few examples, and set it loose on high-resolution aerial images.\n\nThe machine flagged 1,309 likely sites. Researchers then sifted its suggestions, needing on average to look through 36 of them to find one strong candidate, and sorted the best into three ranks; that screening alone took some 1,200 hours. Then came the ground. Between September 2022 and February 2023, with permission from Peru's Ministry of Culture, they walked out to check about a quarter of the candidates on foot, 1,440 hours of labour in the sun. The result was 303 new figures, confirmed in six months, a rate of discovery the team describes as sixteen times faster. The work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in September 2024. The new figures include parrots, cats, monkeys, killer whales and severed heads.\n\nThe larger find was a pattern. With so many more examples, the team could see that Nazca's figures come in two quite different kinds. The giant \"line-type\" figures mostly show wild animals, and they sit along the vast network of straight lines and trapezoids that crosses the pampa. The team believes they were made and used by whole communities for ritual. The small \"relief-type\" figures are different in almost every way. They mostly show people and things people had shaped: humanoid figures, domesticated camelids, decapitated heads. And they sit within sight of the winding footpaths that criss-cross the plain, where only a single walker or a small group would ever see them. The team compares them to billboards, made to share information about human life with whoever passed by.\n\nThis is the mainstream answer to an old question, and it is a strong one. The Andean civilisations had no written language, the team points out, and so they often stored socially important information in the combinations of images painted on pottery, walls and cloth. The lines, in this view, are a library written on the ground. Earlier scholars reached a similar place by other roads: the archaeologist Johan Reinhard argued in 1985 that the lines belonged to the worship of mountains and water, sacred paths in a land where water decided whether people lived or starved.\n\nBut the AI survey answered one question by opening several more. About three quarters of the machine's candidates, 968 of them, have never been checked on the ground. The team now believes there are more than a thousand relief-type figures spread along more than a hundred trails. If the drawings carry information, nobody can yet read it. And the giant figures still raise the problem they always have. They can be glimpsed from the surrounding foothills, but they come together fully only from high above, a view their makers are not known to have had. Why spend the labour of a community drawing a hummingbird that its makers could only ever walk?\n\nThat question has drawn speculation of every kind, including the old claim, popularised by Erich von Däniken in 1968, that the lines were landing strips, a claim scientists have long rejected. The serious puzzle is quieter and stranger. A people without writing drew messages for travellers at eye level, and other figures, far larger, on a scale meant for some audience that could look down.\n\nWho did they imagine was watching from above, and what did they expect it to see?"},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"303","u":"new","h":"Found in 2024 using AI","s":[106]},{"v":"370","u":"m","h":"Largest single figures","s":[106]},{"v":"450","u":"km²","h":"Area covered by the lines","s":[106]},{"v":"500 BC - AD 500","h":"Date","s":[238]}],"hs":{"106":["Wikipedia: Nazca lines (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazca_lines"],"238":["doi.org","https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2407652121"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/ART008.webp","w":1280,"h":852,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f7/L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca%2C_Nazca%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-29%2C_DD_49.JPG/1280px-L%C3%ADneas_de_Nazca%2C_Nazca%2C_Per%C3%BA%2C_2015-07-29%2C_DD_49.JPG?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}