See newly discovered Nazca drawings depicting llamas, human sacrifices and more

With the help of artificial intelligence, researchers have found hundreds of ancient works of art carved into the gravelly soil of Peru’s Nazca Desert. These so-called geoglyphs, featuring decapitated heads, llamas, killer whales with weapons and more, were likely created by the Nazca culture, a pre-Inca South American indigenous group known for creating the famous Nazca Lines.

The Nazca Lines were first recorded by scientists in 1927. Over the next nearly century, researchers attributed around 430 figurative geoglyphs for the Nazca people. Now a new AI-assisted survey has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found 303 additional geoglyphs in just six months. The drawings, made at least 2,000 years ago in a high desert in southern Peru, provide insight into the customs of the ancient Nazca civilization.

The Nazca people blossomed between about 200 B.C. and 600 AD, living in coastal desert settlements along the Nazca River. Archaeologists have found many painted ceramics associated with the Nazca over the centuries, but by far the civilization’s most enduring artifacts are their geoglyphs. The Nazca people carved the drawings into the ground by selectively removing the reddish rock of the desert to expose lighter soil. Their greatest symbols show geometric shapes and patterns as long as 30 miles (48 kilometers), while their representative figures, depicting wild animals and plants, extend to about 1,000 feet (300 meters) long.

To identify the new group of geoglyphs – which are older, smaller and less distinct than those previously discovered – the researchers used an AI model trained to recognize faint lines in satellite images of the desert. The AI ​​can recognize contours 20 times faster than humans, reports Living Science‘s Harry Bakker. After the model identified several figures, the team traveled to some of the scanned locations to confirm the existence of the illustrations.

The scientists spent more than 2,600 hours manually inspecting these sites, capturing drone photography and conducting field inspections, reports New scientist‘s Jeremy Hsu. Lead author anyway Masato Sakaian archaeologist in Japan Yamagata Universitytells Agence France-Presse that the AI ​​model “allowed us to map the distribution of geoglyphs faster and more accurately.”

He adds: “The traditional method of study, which involved visually identifying the geoglyphs from high-resolution images of this vast area, was slow and risked missing some of them.”

The 303 “new” geoglyphs show humanoid figures, cattle, fish, cats, birds, a ceremonial scene, people interacting with animals and — most noticeably — killer whales wielding weapons, the study notes.

“A piece of pottery from the Nazca period depicts scenes of killer whales with knives cutting off human heads,” says Sakai. New scientist. “So we can position orcas as human sacrificial creatures.”

The purpose of the enormous illustrations of the Nazca people, seemingly only noticeable from a bird’s eye view, remains a mysteryalthough some historians argue that civilization created the illustrations with a spiritual motif.

According to UNESCOwhich designated the geoglyphs a World Heritage Site in 1994, the lines represent a “remarkable manifestation of a common religion and social homogeneity.” The study authors believe that in the coming years they will be able to identify another 250 or so Nazca geoglyphs that were highlighted by the AI ​​model but which they did not have time to examine in person.

“The AI-based analysis of remote sensing data is a major step forward, as a complete map of the geoglyphs of the Nazca region is still not available,” Karsten Lamberssays an archaeologist from Leiden University who was not involved in the research New scientist. But “even this new, powerful technology is likely to find the more visible geoglyphs – the low-hanging fruit – than the more difficult ones that probably still exist.”