Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines are a vast group of geoglyphs, designs scraped into the surface of the desert plateau between the towns of Nazca and Palpa in southern Peru, some 400 kilometres south of Lima. They were made, by most estimates, between about 500 BCE and 500 CE, first by people of the Paracas culture and then, on a far larger scale, by the Nazca culture. Hundreds of straight lines, geometric shapes and animal and plant figures, some hundreds of metres long, have survived because the plateau's climate is dry, windless and stable. Why they were made is still debated.

The technique was simple. The desert floor is covered with reddish-brown pebbles coated in iron oxide; removing them exposes a paler, yellow-grey subsoil rich in lime, which hardens with the morning mist and resists erosion. Most lines are trenches only 10 to 15 centimetres deep. Their widths vary, from about 30 centimetres to nearly two metres. Together the lines run for more than 1,300 kilometres.

Most are straight lines and trapezoids, but more than 70 figures show animals and plants, among them a hummingbird about 93 metres long, a condor of 134 metres, a monkey, a spider, a fish and a human. Many are best seen from the air, though they can also be made out from the surrounding foothills. Wooden stakes found at the ends of some lines suggest the builders laid them out with basic surveying methods, and the radiocarbon date of one stake has been used to fix the age of the complex. In the early twenty-first century the investigator Joe Nickell showed that a small team using tools available to the Nazca could reproduce even the largest figures in a few days without any view from above.

Dating varies by method. Researchers usually divide the work into a Paracas phase, about 400 to 200 BCE, and a Nazca phase, about 200 BCE to 500 CE. Markus Reindel and Johny Cuadrado Isla, who since 1996 have documented more than 650 sites and compared the figures with dated pottery, place the figurative designs between 600 and 200 BCE.

Most scholars believe the lines had a religious meaning, but they differ over its nature. The American historian Paul Kosok, who flew over the lines in 1940–41, and the German mathematician Maria Reiche saw them as astronomical markers showing where the sun and stars rose and set on key dates, as ancient builders did elsewhere, for example at Stonehenge. In 1990 the archaeoastronomers Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni concluded that the evidence did not support this. In 1985 Johan Reinhard argued that the lines were linked to the worship of mountains and water, essential in a desert, and that they served as sacred paths to places where water deities were honoured. Other researchers have linked certain lines to underground water channels, or have argued that groups of glyphs near the temple centre of Cahuachi served for ceremonies and processions tied to the farming year. The claim popularised by Erich von Däniken in 1968, that the lines were landing strips for alien visitors, is rejected by scientists as pseudoscience.

The first written mention came from Pedro Cieza de León, a conquistador in the service of the Spanish Empire, who in a book of 1553 took them for trail markers. In the twentieth century Peruvian pilots reported them, and the archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe noticed them while hiking in 1927, presenting them at a conference in 1939. Kosok's and Reiche's work then made them world-famous.

Discoveries continue. A team from Yamagata University in Japan has worked at the site since 2006; with partners including IBM it announced 143 new geoglyphs in 2019, and in 2024 it reported 303 more, found with the help of artificial intelligence and checked on foot. A cat figure on an eroding hillside was found in 2020.

The lines were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994 as the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa. Their fragility has been shown repeatedly: squatters occupied land in the area in 2012, quarry machinery damaged a line in 2013, Greenpeace activists damaged ground beside one figure while laying out a banner in 2014, and a lorry driver drove across three geoglyphs in 2018. A 2025 government plan to shrink the protected reserve by 42 per cent, criticised amid concern about informal mining, was reversed shortly afterwards.