Giant desert drawings in Peru only reveal their shapes from the sky

On a dry plateau in southern Peru, the ground is etched with enormous figures: a hummingbird, a monkey with a curling tail, a spider, and straight lines that run arrow-true for miles. From the surface they are almost impossible to make out, just shallow grooves in the desert. Only from high above do the shapes snap into focus, which is one reason the Nazca Lines went largely unnoticed until aircraft began crossing the region in the twentieth century.

Made more than two thousand years ago by a pre-Inca people, the geoglyphs are among the world’s most striking ancient artworks and among its most debated. How they were built is reasonably well understood. What they meant to the people who made them is still being pieced together, and new figures are still being found.

Figures scratched into the desert

The Nazca Lines lie on the arid Nazca and Palpa plateaus, where the Nazca culture flourished from roughly 100 BCE to 800 CE. They fall into two broad types: sprawling representational figures of animals and plants, and vast geometric shapes, including dead-straight lines and trapezoids that stretch across the landscape. The largest figures are hundreds of feet across, far too big to take in from ground level.

Their survival is a gift of the climate. The Nazca region is one of the driest places on Earth, with almost no rain and little wind at ground level to disturb the surface. That stability has preserved shallow ground markings for two millennia that would have washed away almost anywhere else.

How the lines were made

The technique itself is not mysterious. The desert floor is covered with a layer of reddish-brown stones darkened by iron oxide, and beneath it lies lighter-colored soil. By removing the dark surface stones and piling them along the edges, the Nazca exposed the pale ground underneath, drawing lines of contrast that read as figures. Because the marks are only a few inches deep, the calm, dry conditions were essential to keeping them intact.

Scale did not require flight to achieve. Experiments have shown that the figures could be laid out from the ground using simple tools, stakes and cords, and careful proportional planning, scaling up small designs to monumental size. The builders did not need to see their work from above to make it, even though the full effect only appears from there.

What they might mean

Interpretations have ranged widely over the decades. Early researchers proposed that the lines formed a giant astronomical calendar, with alignments to the sun, moon or stars, though later analysis found the evidence for a comprehensive sky map weak. A more durable idea connects the geoglyphs to water and fertility, resources of desperate importance in a desert, with some lines pointing toward sources of water and the figures tied to rituals meant to summon rain.

The UNESCO World Heritage listing for the lines and geoglyphs of Nazca and Palpa emphasizes their likely ritual and ceremonial function, part of a sacred landscape people may have walked in procession. The straight-line figures in particular seem to have been paths, meant to be traveled rather than merely viewed.

The dating rests on several converging lines of evidence. Pottery fragments left along the lines, radiocarbon dates from wooden stakes found at some figures, and the styles of the drawings themselves all point to the Nazca and their predecessors, tying the geoglyphs to a real cultural period rather than any mysterious lost people. The same ceramic motifs that decorate Nazca pots, from killer whales to mythical beings, reappear as figures on the desert floor. That overlap is one of the clearest links between the art on the ground and the society that made it.

New discoveries from the sky and from AI

The catalog of figures keeps growing. In 2024, a team from Yamagata University in Japan used artificial intelligence to comb through aerial imagery and identified 303 previously unknown geoglyphs, roughly doubling the number of known figurative designs. As the Archaeological Institute of America’s Archaeology magazine reported, the newly found images tend to be smaller relief-type figures clustered along ancient trails, depicting animals, humanoids and domesticated llamas.

That pattern has strengthened the view that many of the smaller geoglyphs were made and encountered by people moving on foot, while the giant line figures required communal planning and served group ritual. Far from settling the debate, the flood of new figures has given researchers far more data to work with.

The Nazca Lines endure as a paradox: an art form built to be walked but best seen from the air, made by a vanished culture whose exact intentions remain out of reach. Each new survey adds figures to the desert’s tally, and the plateau keeps offering up shapes that had gone unnoticed for two thousand years.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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