With the help of an artificial intelligence (AI) system, a group of archaeologists have discovered in a few months almost as many geoglyphs in the Nazca desert (Peru) as those found in the last century. The large number of new figures has allowed their discoverers to differentiate between two major types and offer an explanation of the possible motives or functions that led their creators more than 2,000 years ago to draw them on the earth.
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The Nazca desert, with an area of about 500 square kilometers and an average altitude of 500 meters, has very special climatic conditions. It hardly rains, the hot air blocks the wind and the very dry land has prevented the development of agriculture or livestock. Combined, all this has allowed a series of lines and figures, formed by stacking and aligning pebbles and cobbles, to be preserved for centuries. The first layer of the soil is formed by a mantle of small reddish stones that, when lifted, reveal a second yellowish layer. This difference in color is at the base of the geoglyphs and is what was used to create them in the ancient Nazca civilization. Some are straight lines of several kilometers. Others are geometric shapes or figures also rectilinear, with an enormous length of an average of 90 meters. The other large group are the so-called relief-type geoglyphs, which are smaller.
In the 1930s, Peruvian aviators discovered the first ones, and by the end of the century more than a hundred were identified, such as the hummingbird, the frog or the whale. Since 2004, supported by high-resolution satellite images, Japanese archaeologists have found 318 more, almost all of them relief geoglyphs. The same team, led by Masato Sakai, a scientist at Yamagata University (Japan), discovered 303 new geoglyphs in a single campaign. That said, supported by artificial intelligence.
“It speeds up the discovery process,” Sakai acknowledges when asked about the advantage of artificial intelligence. “The Nazca pampas is a vast area covering more than 400 square kilometers and no exhaustive study has been carried out,” recalls the Japanese scientist. Only the northern part, where the large linear geoglyphs are concentrated, “has been studied relatively intensively,” he adds. But in the rest of the desert there are scattered many relief-like figures that are smaller and that the passage of time has made more difficult to detect.
Convinced that there were many more, Sakai and his team contacted IBM’s artificial intelligence division, where the Watson system came from. They had high-resolution images obtained from aircraft or satellites from all over Nazca, but with a resolution of up to a few centimeters per pixel, the human eye would have needed years, if not decades, to analyze all the data. That job was left to the AI system. Although it was not easy to train its artificial vision (see comparison below) with so few previous images and so different from each other, the machine came up with 1,309 candidates. The number came from a previous selection also made by the AI with 36 images for each candidate. With this selection, the researchers conducted a field expedition between September 2022 and February 2023. The result, as reported in the scientific journal PNAS, is 303 new geoglyphs added to this cultural heritage of humanity. All of them are of relief type.
The new forms discovered bring the total number found in Nazca to 50 forms created with large lines and 683 relief geoglyphs, both geometric and forming figures. The large number accumulated has allowed the authors of this work to detect patterns and differences. Almost all of the former (the monkey, the condor, the cactus…) represent wild motifs, wild animals or plants. However, among the latter, almost 82% show human or human-modified elements (humanoids, domesticated animals, such as llamas, and many decapitated heads, up to 33% of the total). “They are parts of human sacrificial scenes,” Sakai recounts.
The location of these severed heads and almost all the other relief geoglyphs gives another clue, in this case about their function. The accumulation of data that this work has allowed brings to light a double connection. On the one hand, these relief-like forms are found just a few meters from one of the many trails that cross the desert. They are not roadways, but paths created by the passage of people until a trail is created. According to the authors of the study, these creations were made to be seen by hikers. On the other side, the large linear figures appear very close, also meters away, from one of the many straight lines that cut through the pampas. Here, according to Sakai, the symbolic value rules: “The line-type geoglyphs are drawn at the starting and ending points of the pilgrimage route to the Cahuachi ceremonial center. They were ceremonial spaces with animal shapes and other figures. Meanwhile, the relief-type geoglyphs can be observed when walking along the trails”. Cahuachi was the seat of spiritual power of the Nazca culture between the century before this era and the year 500 of this era and, for the authors, the large forms could be ceremonial stops on the pilgrimage to or from there.
These explanations do not necessarily rule out, according to the authors, other possible functions that have been attributed to the Nazca lines and figures, such as calendars, astronomical maps or even systems for capturing the little water that fell. What they are sure of is that artificial intelligence can revolutionize archaeology, as it has done with Nazca.
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