Giant Desert Drawings in Peru That Still Puzzle Researchers
Ancient people in Peru scraped enormous lines and animal shapes into the desert, and more than a century of study has not settled what they were for.
In the desert of coastal Peru there are drawings so big that from the ground they look like nothing at all. The Nazca Lines are shapes scraped into the dry earth: a spider, a figure that looks a bit like a person, a flower, a long straight line. They were made roughly 2,000 years ago, and after more than a century of study, nobody can say for certain what they were for.
Thousands of designs, made long before writing
The Nazca people created these designs on the arid hills and valleys of coastal Peru between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500. That was long before writing was used in the region, which is one reason the answer is hard to pin down: no written note was left behind explaining what the lines were for.
The designs are called geoglyphs, which simply means large figures made on the ground. They show humans, animals, geometric shapes, plants and flowers, and their combined length reaches more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometres). They are the most famous geoglyphs in the world.
Nobody knows exactly how many there are. The count runs into the thousands, and new geoglyphs are still being found, sometimes with the help of artificial intelligence — computer programs that can pick out faint shapes in pictures of the ground.
One answer may not fit them all
Scientists have been debating the purpose of the lines since they were first formally investigated in the early 20th century. Ana Nieves, a professor of art history at Northeastern Illinois University, said there "are many ideas out there about their function and meaning". She noted that the geoglyphs are not all alike: some are relatively larger and some smaller, and some sit on hillsides while others lie on the pampas, the flat plains. In her view, "it is not likely that a single explanation would apply to all".
The Nazca people made the designs over a long stretch of time, from 200 B.C. to A.D. 500, so it would not be surprising if their meaning shifted along the way.
Aliens, rituals and roads
The most outlandish idea proposed over the years is that the lines were landing sites for alien spaceships. More grounded theories link them to cultural and religious practices.
Karsten Lambers, a professor of art history at the University of Augsburg in Germany, wrote in an essay published in a 2017 book about the geoglyphs of the Nazca and Palpa deserts that the question is hard to answer "given that we lack any type of preserved oral or written testimony". He added that the uses of the geoglyphs may have changed over time.
One suggestion is that the lines were first used to mark routes for travellers crossing the desert. If that is right, the same drawings could have meant different things to different generations of people, which would explain why no single story fits them all.