Imagine flying high above the sun-drenched plains of southern Peru where the land is a canvas for ancient puzzles or riddles. Carved into the desert floor are massive drawings of, among other things, spiders, hummingbirds and monkeys, which have puzzled explorers for centuries. These drawings, known as the Nazca Lines, are one of the most enigmatic forms of human expression in the world and only possible to see from the sky.
What if I said that in 2024, state-of-the-art technology peeled back the sands of time and revealed hundreds more? Thanks to the information, or the brain, that is artificial intelligence, who thinks more like an archaeologist than I do, it revealed 303 new geoglyphs, which is almost double what we knew about this UNESCO World Heritage site. Join me as we fly into these Peruvian geoglyphs, try to tease apart what they might have been for, and consider their immense cultural significance.
A Eternal Canvas
The Nazca Desert, a vast, arid expanse stretching over 170 square miles, has long been synonymous with intrigue. First spotted by modern eyes in the 1920s, the geoglyphs were created by the Nazca people, a pre-Incan culture that flourished between 200 BCE and 600 CE. They made these massive designs by removing the dark, reddish pebbles from the surface to expose the lighter soil beneath. Until recently, we knew of about 430 such figures, many discovered through aerial surveys starting in the 1940s. But the desert is immense, and human eyes can only spot so much—especially the fainter, smaller ones hidden among the rocks and windswept dunes.
AI as the Ultimate Archaeologist
A geoglyph discovered in Nazca, Peru, with an annotated version to highlight the image. Photograph: University of Yamagata
Enter 2025, a significant year when AI leaped forward in a much needed upgrade as an archaeological detective. Researchers in Japan from Yamagata University, along with collaborators from Université Paris and IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, trained an AI model on high-resolution satellite imagery and drone footage, and the advanced software picked up on over 629 square kilometres, patterns that the human eye generally can't see. It was more than we thought imaginable in archaeology. AI has proven successful in areas that we thought would be impossible for it to improve upon as it had already happened in things like decoding ancient scrolls that survived the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano, grainy images processed and labelled in real-time on a single laptop 20 times faster than an archaeologist would typically process for geoglyphs.
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Top Image: ‘With a drone, you can cover several kilometers in a day,’ said Johny Isla. Composite: University of Yamagata
