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A Japanese research team trained an artificial intelligence that helped locate 303 new geoglyphs in the mysterious Nazca Desert of Peru.
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The ancient drawings add to the 430 geoglyphs found in the area already, baffling scientists and attracting tourists.
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The team hopes that these new geoglyph finds—much trickier to locate than previous discoveries—can help AI to better understand the lines and discover hundreds more.
Lines crafted in an ancient Peruvian desert are more than random curves and angles. People of the Nazca culture—and, potentially, pre-Nazca Paracas culture—created drawings on the ground between 200 B.C. and 700 A.D. that measure up to 1,200 feet in size. A new research study employed artificial intelligence to find 303 previously unknown examples of these famed geoglyphs.
The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how researchers used AI learning (the authors partnered with experts from IBM) to spot the faint lines captured by drone footage. The team used on-the-ground experts to confirm the new sites—one of which even featured an orca whale wielding a knife.
“The use of AI in research has allowed us to map the distribution of geoglyphs more quickly and accurately,” Masato Sakai, one study co-author from Yamagata University said in a press conference, according to The Guardian. The paper noted that the six-month study produced results 20 times faster than traditional methods.
“What used to take three or four years can now be done in two or three days,” said Johny Isla, Peru’s chief archaeologist for the Nazca Lines, according to The Guardian.
What these geoglyphs and others like them were used for is still a mystery, and one that may now be even more muddled.
Known as the Nazca Lines—named a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994—430 of these geoglyphs were already known. Spread over 150 square miles, they depict everything from animals to plants and humans to abstract human-inspired drawings, including one known as the “astronaut,” and have become a major tourist attraction in Peru.
The Nazca creations come spliced into two categories. The largest of the group are considered line-type glyphs, and were made by carving into the landscape and using rocks to scrape away soil and reveal new colors below. Due to the color contrast and size, the larger glyphs were often the first ones discovered by modern researchers. The largest designs are generally geometric shapes, while others show wild animals or plants.
The second type, known as a relief glyph, features white and black stones to create smaller images—often only 30 feet in size. Thanks to their less intense contrast with the natural landscape and their relatively small size, relief glyphs have traditionally been more difficult to uncover. The recently uncovered geoglyphs are of human-like figures and animals, including a 72-foot-long killer whale with a knife.
“On some pottery from the Nazca period, there are scenes depicting orcas with knives cutting off human heads,” Sakai told New Scientist. “So, we can position orcas as beings that carry out human sacrifice.”
Almost all of the 303 new glyphs confirmed in the study are of the relief variety, with 80 percent of those showing humanoid figures, decapitated heads, and domesticated animals (llamas were a popular depiction).
The authors wrote that the relief-type designs are found near foot trails, leading researchers to believe that they were meant to be seen by small groups traveling along the paths. The line-type glyphs (which often show wild animals) are more closely linked to rituals and are found near ceremonial pathways, where they were potentially drawn large enough to be seen by the Nazca gods. Typically, the largest creations are only fully viewable from above.
The study reported that this recent research vastly improved accounts of relief-type figurative geoglyphs, revealing the differences between them and line-type figurative geoglyphs beyond style and size (they also vary in their motif depictions, relation to trails and ceremonial locations, and distribution). “Taken together, this makes a compelling case for different nature and purposes of relief-type and line-type figurative geoglyphs,” the study authors wrote.
“We can say that these geoglyphs were made by humans for humans, they often show scenes from everyday life,” Isla told The Guardian. “Whereas the geoglyphs of the Nazca period are gigantic figures made on mostly flat surfaces to be seen by their gods.”
The researchers believe another 250 relief-type glyphs could be out there for the finding. Let’s hope their AI tools continue to deliver.
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