The Nazca Lines in brief
The Nazca Lines lie on a dry plateau, the Pampa de Nazca, between the towns of Nazca and Palpa in southern Peru. Over an area of about 450 square kilometres, people drew hundreds of large figures and many hundreds of straight lines, by removing the dark, iron-stained stones on the surface to reveal the paler ground underneath. In the dry, windless climate, the lines have survived for two thousand years. They were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, with the Palpa lines.
The figures
More than 650 figures are now known, including geoglyphs of shapes: animals such as a hummingbird, a monkey with a curled tail, a spider, a whale, a condor, a pelican and a lizard, plants and some human-like figures. Some are over 100 metres long. The lines, which are straight, cross the plateau for kilometres, and trapezoids and triangles, up to hundreds of metres long, are among the largest forms.
The images are made of a single continuous line in many cases. Archaeologists believe that the makers marked out the designs using cords and stakes, with a small-scale plan, and they have found wooden stakes at the ends of lines, which gave radiocarbon dates.
Who made them?
Most were made by the Nazca culture, which flourished in the area from about 200 BC to 500 AD, while some earlier designs, on hillsides, are by the earlier Paracas culture, and are believed to date to about 500 BC.
Discovery
The Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe noticed lines when walking in the hills in 1927. In the 1930s, pilots started to see them from planes. The American historian Paul Kosok studied the lines from 1941 and thought they were an astronomical calendar. The German-born mathematician Maria Reiche devoted her life from the 1940s to studying and protecting them, living in the desert until her death in 1998.
Why were they made?
Nobody can be sure. Several ideas exist:
- Astronomy. Kosok and Reiche suggested that some lines point to the places where the sun rose at the solstices, though later tests found that only a minority of lines match.
- Water and ritual. The region is one of the driest on Earth, and many researchers think the lines were walked in ceremonies to ask for water, or marked paths between sacred places and sources of water.
- Not aliens. The theory popularised by Erich von Däniken that the lines were landing strips for spaceships is rejected by archaeologists. The people who made them could have done so with simple tools, and experiments have recreated the figures with a few people in a short time.
New discoveries
New figures are still being found. In 2019 a team from Yamagata University in Japan reported 143 new figures, and in 2024 the same group, using artificial intelligence on aerial images, reported about 300 more, mostly small, which roughly doubled the known number.
Protecting the lines
The lines are threatened by trespassers, and by informal settlement. In 2014 Greenpeace activists left footprints on the site, in a protest which was widely criticised. Today access to the plateau is controlled.
Visiting
Visitors see the figures from small planes taking off from Nazca, or from towers along the Pan-American Highway. Walking on the lines is not allowed.
Sources
- Aveni, A. F. (ed.) (1990). The Lines of Nazca. American Philosophical Society.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre. Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa.