Nazca · Peru · -14.7390, -75.1300 · PYR record in the living atlas
In 1927 the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe walked into the foothills above the Nazca pampa and saw the lines from the ground. That single fact disposes of a great deal of what has been written since. On the desert plateau between the Andes and the Pacific, people of the Paracas and Nazca cultures spent the better part of a millennium drawing at a scale that reads best from above but was never invisible from below. The bounds vary with the source and with which culture is being counted: the Paracas phase is usually put at roughly 500 to 200 BC, and the Nazca phase proper at roughly 200 BC to somewhere between 500 and 700 AD. Straight lines run for kilometres. Trapezoids cover hectares. The dense geoglyph field covers about 50 square kilometres, set inside a wider marked plateau of around 440, and published areas differ mostly because they are measuring those two different things. Among them walk the figures everyone knows: the hummingbird, the monkey with the spiral tail, the spider, the condor, and a pelican given in published lists as 285 metres long.
The technique is the easy part
There is nothing unresolved about how the lines were made. The desert surface is a pavement of dark, oxidised stones lying on pale clay and sand. Lift the dark stones aside, pile them at the edge, and a light line appears. In one of the driest places on Earth it stays. Straight runs were laid out with cord between wooden stakes, and stakes recovered on site line up with the lines themselves; figures were scaled up from smaller models. In the early 1980s the investigator Joe Nickell and a small team reproduced a full-sized Nazca figure using only stakes, cord and simple tools, and the result was accurate enough to photograph from the air. The aridity, not any special method, is why drawings scraped two thousand years ago are still legible.
There are two different kinds of drawing, and that is the news
In September 2024 a team led by Masato Sakai of Yamagata University published a survey in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that changed the shape of the problem. Using a convolutional neural network trained to flag candidate geoglyphs across 629 square kilometres of pampa, then checking the candidates on foot, they confirmed 303 previously unrecorded figurative geoglyphs in a single six-month field season of 2022 and 2023. About 380 were known before, so the figurative total roughly doubled to 683. For scale, the discovery rate between 2004 and 2020 had been about 18.7 a year. The machine did not find anything by itself: archaeologists screened roughly 36 candidates for every one that turned out to be real.
The counting is not the interesting part. The survey showed that the geoglyphs fall into two populations that behave differently. The relief-type figures average about nine metres across, and 81.6 per cent of them carry human-related subjects: humanoid figures, decapitated heads, domesticated animals. They cluster around 43 metres from the winding meshwork of foot trails. The line-type figures average about 90 metres, 64 per cent of them show wild animals, and they sit near the network of straight lines and trapezoids rather than the trails. The reading the authors offer is that the small ones were made to be seen by individuals or small groups walking past, while the large ones were community work tied to movement across the pampa toward the ceremonial centre at Cahuachi.
There is a second division, older than that survey and much less often mentioned. Ceramic evidence associated with the geoglyphs suggests the figurative biomorphs came first, with the large straight lines and trapezoids belonging to later phases of occupation. On Persis Clarkson's reading of the ceramic surveys, the main-pampa geometrics may run as late as the Late Intermediate Period. That is not universally accepted. It matters for every argument about purpose, because if the animals and the geometrics are separated by centuries then a single explanation covering both was never likely. Whether the pampa records one cultural episode or several, and whether different groups made different types, is open.
Why, and who was watching
Purpose is genuinely debated, and the honest answer holds several possibilities at once. Paul Kosok undertook the first sustained investigation here in the early 1940s and proposed an astronomical function, but the observation behind his famous verdict was a single one: a sunset falling near one line a few days after the winter solstice of 1941, which prompted him to call the pampa the largest astronomy book in the world. Later researchers treat that as an anecdote rather than as evidence of systematic astronomical planning. Maria Reiche then spent fifty years on the idea that the pampa was a calendar, sweeping the lines clear with a broom, funding a viewing tower and getting access restricted. She was right about the site's importance and probably wrong about the calendar. Gerald Hawkins tested 186 lines by computer in 1967 and 1968 against solar, lunar, planetary and stellar bearings appropriate to the construction period, and found that about 20 per cent showed some correspondence, which is no more than chance predicts across that many lines pointing in that many directions. Anthony Aveni's team repeated the exercise in the early 1980s and reached the same result. That is the same null-model logic our own engines apply, and it is why a handful of lines pointing at solstice positions is not a finding.
Aveni's work deserves naming for more than the negative result. The interdisciplinary fieldwork he led from Colgate between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, with the anthropologist Gary Urton, the archaeologist Persis Clarkson and the astronomer Clive Ruggles, produced the first statistically rigorous description of the geoglyphs and of how they are organised across the pampa. Most of what can be said carefully about the lines rests on it.
What the last three decades have added is water. The pampa is desperately dry, and the Nazca met that with the puquios, spiralling access shafts feeding filtration galleries that still deliver water today. Lines converge on points connected to water sources, spirals recall conch shells and the puquio mouths, and the Nasca-Palpa project from 1997 onward read the pampa as ceremonial and processional. Johan Reinhard has argued at length for a water and fertility cult as the organising idea, and Aveni's own survey found a possible but not conclusive tendency for some lines to point toward mountain peaks or water sources on the horizon. Cahuachi supports the ceremonial reading: excavation by Helaine Silverman in the 1980s and by Giuseppe Orefici over decades showed that the 1.5 square kilometre site with its forty-odd adobe mounds was not a city at all but a pilgrimage centre, swelling with people around ceremonies and largely empty otherwise, abandoned around 450 to 500 AD. Ceremony, water and sky are not rivals. Many of the figures are single continuous paths, which is the strongest hint of all: they were made to be walked.
A third mainstream proposal comes from Aveni and Urton, who read the lines as a ceque-like system: a radial network of sacred pathways organising territorial, social and ritual space in the way the ceque lines of Inca Cuzco did. It is under evaluation rather than established. The honest summary is that no single theory currently leads, the water reading included, and that most mainstream researchers now expect the lines served several overlapping purposes across the centuries in which they were made and used.
The runway claim, and the balloon
The famous alternative is the suggestion, put into wide circulation by Erich von Daniken's 1968 book, that the trapezoids are landing strips. It fails on the ground, literally: the surface is soft clay and sand, and anything landing at speed would gouge it rather than roll on it. The figures are also drawn on that same soft surface and would not survive a single arrival.
The more interesting version came in 1975, when Jim Woodman and the International Explorers Society built a hot-air balloon he called Condor I from materials he argued were available to the Nazca, and flew it briefly over the pampa. Give it its due: the flight happened. What it demonstrated is that a balloon can be made from simple materials, not that the Nazca made one. No Nazca pottery shows a balloon, no burn pits large enough to inflate one have been found, and no textile of the required size exists in the record. There is no archaeological, artistic or textual evidence for balloon technology anywhere in the Andes. And the premise itself is unnecessary, because the lines do not require aerial oversight to lay out, and because Mejia Xesspe saw them in 1927 by climbing a hill.
The measurements are softer than the confidence
One thing worth flagging: the sizes quoted for the famous figures vary a great deal between reputable sources, sometimes by a factor of two for the same drawing, the product of a century of separate measurements of ambiguous outlines with no agreed standard. It is another reason the 2024 survey matters beyond its headline count. Systematic averages across a large sample, gathered the same way, are worth more than any celebrity figure's disputed length.
What is not settled
How the work was organised is not established from the archaeological record. Whether the geoglyphs were made by community labour gangs, by priestly specialists or by kin groups, and how the effort was coordinated across a plateau of this size, are open questions rather than details awaiting confirmation. So is whether the line centres, the points from which many lines radiate, were planned as centres or simply accumulated as one line after another was drawn from a convenient spot.
What could still be lost
The pampa is fragile in a way stone monuments are not: a single set of tyre tracks is permanent. Greenpeace activists damaged ground beside the hummingbird during a publicity stunt in 2014, and a lorry driver later drove across part of the site. The larger threat is administrative. In 2025 the Peruvian government reduced the protected Nazca archaeological reserve by 42 per cent, more than a thousand hectares, arguing the cut was based on updated studies and would not affect the UNESCO listing. Critics, including Peru's former vice minister of the environment Mariana Castro, warned that the released land opened the door to informal gold mining. After an international outcry the ministry published an open letter on 8 June 2025 reversing the decision and restoring full protection.
What our engines found
Nothing usable, and the reason is ours rather than the site's. Our alignment engine measures great-circle distance ratios between catalogued sites. Inside a 200 km radius of Nazca our atlas holds only two catalogued sites. Two points give a single distance, far too few to tell signal from chance, so we report the gap instead of a number.
A sparse catalogue is a hole in our data. It is never evidence of absence in prehistory, and anyone who tells you otherwise is reading a limitation as a finding. Expanding coverage in this part of the world is on our roadmap, and when it lands this section will carry a real result you can reproduce yourself.
One limit worth stating plainly, because it is the one most often glossed over. This test compares positions between monuments. It says nothing about any building's own proportions, its height, base, slope or perimeter. That is a separate question, and at several sites a genuinely open one.
Explore it yourself
Open the Nazca record in the living atlas to see the pampa in 3D among its neighbours on the Peruvian coast and set the sky to any date you like. The Nazca site-emblem tee carries the hummingbird, the site name and the exact coordinates in the Pyramason Chronicle style.
Sources worth reading
Sakai, M. et al., "AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose", PNAS (2024). Aveni, A. F. (ed.), The Lines of Nazca, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society (1990). Aveni, Between the Lines, University of Texas Press (2000). Silverman, H. and Proulx, D. A., The Nasca, Blackwell (2002). Silverman, Cahuachi in the Ancient Nasca World, University of Iowa Press (1993).