Nazca culture

Best known for the vast figures and lines scratched into the desert floor of southern Peru, the Nazca (or Nasca) culture flourished from about 100 BCE to around 800 CE along the rivers that feed the Rio Grande de Nazca and in the Ica Valley. Heirs to the Paracas culture of the same coast, the Nazca were skilled potters and weavers and capable engineers, who tapped underground water to farm one of the driest landscapes on earth.

Archaeologists date the Nazca mainly through their pottery, whose changing styles divide the culture into a Proto Nazca phase (about 100 BCE to 1 CE), Early Nazca (1 to 450 CE), Middle Nazca (450 to 550) and Late Nazca (550 to 750). The final pottery phases are now placed in the Middle Horizon, when power shifted to the highlands with the rise of the Wari culture from around 650. The end date of Nazca itself is given variously between 750 and 800.

Early Nazca society seems to have consisted of local chiefdoms and centres of regional power clustered around Cahuachi, in the lower Nazca Valley, where natural hills were reshaped into mounds and plazas. Cahuachi has yielded large amounts of fine painted pottery, textiles and ritual objects but little everyday ware, so archaeologists interpret it as a ceremonial centre, not a town, visited for rituals and feasts linked to water, farming and fertility. Commoners could obtain prized polychrome vessels there, while elites gained labour and status. Building at Cahuachi stopped around the end of Nazca 3 or the start of Nazca 4, which most scholars link to a widespread Andean drought.

The Nazca grew maize, squash, beans, sweet potato, manioc and achira, along with cotton, coca, gourds and the San Pedro cactus, and kept llamas for wool, meat and transport. In the Middle Nazca period they began building puquios, underground channels dug into hillsides to reach groundwater, lined with unmortared stone and opened at intervals by access holes. Dating them is difficult because excavation destroyed their original context; analysis of varnish on their stones supports the Middle Nazca date. Several dozen still carry water today.

Nazca potters painted vessels before firing, using at least twelve colours, a change from the resin-painted wares of Paracas. Early pieces show fruit, animals and people in a naturalistic style; later phases crowd their mythical beings with rays and tassels, and show influence from the Moche culture of the north coast. Art depicts nature spirits such as the killer whale and a spotted cat, and above all a human-like mythical being. Severed heads, pierced so that they could be carried on a cord, appear in art and in burials; their number rises in the Middle and Late periods, perhaps in a time of drought and conflict. Skulls also show trephination, some with healing, and deliberate shaping in infancy.

The geoglyphs were made by clearing away the dark, iron-coated stones of the desert surface to expose paler ground. The Nazca phase of line-making runs from about 200 BCE to 500 CE, following an earlier phase associated with Paracas. Besides hundreds of straight lines and simple shapes, over 70 figures show animals and plants, among them a hummingbird, a monkey and a spider; 358 geoglyphs were known in 2022, and a survey aided by artificial intelligence identified 303 more in 2024. Their purpose is still debated. Paul Kosok and Maria Reiche proposed astronomical alignments, which Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni judged unproven in 1990; Johan Reinhard argued in 1985 that they were sacred paths tied to the worship of water and mountains. The lines became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

Decline began from about 500 CE. One explanation is that a severe El Niño brought destructive floods, made worse because the Nazca had gradually cleared Prosopis pallida trees, which held soils and riverbanks in place, to clear fields for maize and cotton.

Our maps from 100 BCE to 500 CE draw the Nazca culture as an approximate area on Peru's southern coast. On the 100 BCE map it lies near the Chavín, and on the 500 CE map the Moche appear to the north.