Nazca Lines

Timeline

1. 400 BCE

   Paracas Period Begins

   The Paracas phase of geoglyphs (400 to 200 BCE) begins with the earliest geometric figures appearing before the later Nazca phase takes shape.

2. 200 BCE

   Nazca Civilization Main Phase

   The main Nazca phase (200 BCE to 500 CE) opens, and the principal geoglyph groups including the major animal and plant figures are created over the following centuries.

3. circa 525 CE

   C14 date of wooden stake

   Approximate date (margin plus or minus 80 years) later obtained from a wooden stake at the end of a straight line, the foundation of all geoglyph chronology.

4. 1553

   Earliest Written Record

   Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León records the existence of the lines as "road markers" in his chronicle, the first written mention in history.

5. 1927

   Mejía Xesspe sights lines

   Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe spots the straight-line geoglyphs while hiking through the foothills near Nazca.

6. June 1939

   Kosok finds animal figure

   American historian Paul Kosok identifies the first bird-shaped animal geoglyph from the air over the Nazca plateau.

7. 1941

   Maria Reiche settles

   German mathematician Maria Reiche moves permanently to Nazca and devotes her life to measuring and protecting the lines, becoming the "Guardian of Nazca."

8. 1953

   C14 dating by Strong

   William Duncan Strong of Columbia University radiocarbon-dates a wooden stake at the line terminus, yielding a date around 525 CE.

9. December 1994

   World Heritage Inscription

   UNESCO inscribes the site as "Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana" at the 18th World Heritage Committee session.

10. 1998

    Maria Reiche dies

    Maria Reiche passes away at age 95 and is buried in Nazca, remembered ever since as a Peruvian national heroine.

11. October 2012

    Yamagata Research Institute

    Yamagata University opens its on-site Nazca Institute, beginning resident fieldwork led by Professor Masato Sakai and his team.

12. September 2019

    IBM academic agreement

    Yamagata University and IBM Japan sign an academic agreement to develop automatic geoglyph detection using Watson AI on aerial imagery.

13. 2019

    143 new figures discovered

    The Yamagata team announces the simultaneous discovery of 143 new geoglyphs identified through satellite imagery and AI analysis.

14. February 2023

    Total reaches 733 figures

    Confirmed geoglyphs reach 733 in total (683 area-type and 50 line-type), with further increases expected as ongoing AI surveys continue.

Detailed History

The Nazca Lines were created between roughly 500 BCE and 500 CE, spanning the late Paracas culture and the height of the ancient Nazca civilization. In 1953, William Duncan Strong of Columbia University radiocarbon-dated a wooden stake found at the terminus of one of the straight lines and obtained a date of around 525 CE (with an error margin of about plus or minus 80 years), establishing the basic chronology for the geoglyphs. Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León had already mentioned the lines as "road markers" in his 1553 chronicle, but the large animal figures only entered scholarly literature with the arrival of aerial observation in the twentieth century. In 1927 the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe spotted the straight lines while hiking through the foothills, and on June 22, 1939 the American historian Paul Kosok identified the first bird-shaped figure from the air. From 1941 the German mathematician Maria Reiche (1903 to 1998) settled permanently in Nazca, beginning a lifelong program of measurement and preservation. Her 1976 book on the desert mystery brought the site international attention, and on December 17, 1994 UNESCO inscribed the lines as a World Heritage Site. In the twenty-first century Yamagata University launched its Nazca research program in 2004 and opened its on-site Nazca Institute in October 2012; the team led by Professor Masato Sakai reported two new geoglyphs in 2011, 24 in 2015, 143 in 2019, and more than 300 cumulative discoveries by 2024, bringing the verified total to 733 figures as of February 2023. In September 2019 Yamagata signed an academic agreement with IBM Japan and began training an automatic-detection model on aerial imagery using IBM Watson Machine Learning Community Edition, accelerating the discovery rate substantially.

Cultural Significance

UNESCO inscribed the site on December 17, 1994 under the official name "Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana," meeting criteria (i), (iii), and (iv) for masterpieces of human creative genius, unique testimony to a vanished civilization, and outstanding examples of a significant stage in human history. The ancient Nazca civilization flourished along the southern Peruvian coast from roughly the second through the seventh centuries CE, and the close stylistic kinship between the geoglyphs and the elaborate motifs on Nazca polychrome pottery has driven decades of debate over their function — religious ritual, ancestor worship, astronomical calendar, water cult, or some combination of these. Line-type figures featuring orcas and birds have been read as symbols of the water cycle linking sky, land, and sea, while area-type figures along pilgrimage paths suggest small-group ceremonial use. Some scholars connect the lines to the great Cahuachi pyramid complex and to ritual practices including human sacrifice, but no single interpretation has prevailed — a productive ambiguity that keeps drawing travelers. Erich von Däniken's "ancient astronauts" theory captured popular imagination in the late twentieth century, but Joe Nickell and others have shown that simple tools and careful planning by the Nazca themselves were entirely sufficient.

Architectural Details

The technique behind the Nazca Lines is deceptively simple: workers cleared the dark, iron-oxide-coated pebbles of the desert pavement in strips one to two meters wide and twenty to thirty centimeters deep, exposing the pale, unoxidized subsoil to create the contrasting designs. Most lines are about 33 centimeters wide, though widths range from roughly 30 centimeters up to 1.8 meters depending on location. Representative figure sizes are striking: the hummingbird measures about 93 meters in length, the monkey 93 by 58 meters, the spider about 47 meters, the condor about 134 meters, and the human-like figure popularly called the "astronaut" about 32 meters. Line-type animal figures average about 90 meters and are typically drawn in a single continuous stroke, while area-type figures depicting livestock and half-human, half-animal beings are made by arranging dark stones on hillsides and average just nine meters across. The combined length of all lines exceeds 1,300 kilometers, and the largest geometric figures reach about 370 meters on a side. The plateau's extraordinary microclimate — annual rainfall of only about four millimeters, persistent southerly winds, and a warm air layer that forms over rocks heated by the midday sun — has shielded the lines from erosion for more than two millennia.