Nazca Lines: what they are, who made them and how, the theories from astronomy to aliens, and what the new AI survey found

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Nazca Lines are about 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures and 70 drawings of animals and plants scraped into the surface of the desert pampa 400 km south of Lima, Peru, between about 500 BC and AD 500, mostly by the Nazca culture, whose people removed the dark, sun-varnished stones of the desert floor to expose the pale ground beneath in lines a metre or so wide; the figures, a hummingbird 93 m long, a monkey with a spiral tail, a spider, a condor, a killer whale and a "spaceman" on a hillside, are too large to see from the ground and were discovered from the air in the 1920s and 30s, and the lines run straight for up to 20 km across valleys and hills. They were made with stakes, cords and simple surveying, which anyone with a few dozen people can repeat; why they were made is argued, the best-supported answers being that the lines were walked in rituals to the mountain gods for water and that the figures were offerings, and a 2024 survey using artificial intelligence found 303 more small figures near the paths, which strengthens the ritual-path reading. Below: what they are, how they were made, who made them, the theories in order of credibility, the damage and protection, how to see them, and the myths, with the other mysteries of the Americas in Teotihuacan and the mystery of Machu Picchu.

What they are

• Lines. About 800, from a few metres to 20 km long, straight to within a few metres over their length, some radiating from about 60 "ray centres" on hills, some running parallel, some crossing others made earlier.
• Geometric figures. About 300 trapezoids, triangles, zigzags and spirals, the trapezoids up to 800 m long and 100 m wide, often with a line entering one end.
• Biomorphs. About 70 figures of animals and plants, each a single continuous line that never crosses itself, so that it can be walked from entrance to exit: the hummingbird (93 m), the monkey (110 m), the spider (46 m), the condor (134 m), the pelican (285 m, the largest), the dog, the lizard cut in half by the Pan-American Highway in the 1930s, the whale, the tree, the hands, and the "astronaut" or owl-man on a hill at Nazca, 32 m, with a round head and one hand raised.
• Palpa figures. On the hillsides 20 km north, older figures of the Paracas culture, 500–200 BC, of people, warriors and animals, made to be seen from the valley below, and the 2018 and 2024 discoveries of hundreds more.
• Area. About 450 square kilometres of the Nazca pampa between the Ingenio and Nazca rivers, listed by UNESCO in 1994.

Nazca Lines.

How they were made and why they last

The pampa is a plain of pale clay and gypsum covered by a layer of small stones that iron oxide and desert varnish have turned reddish-brown over millennia; removing the stones, by hand and by sweeping, to a depth of 10 to 15 cm, and piling them along the edges, leaves a pale line with darker borders that is visible from above and, at sunrise and sunset when the shadows are long, from the hills. The work is easy: a team of ten people made a 30 m line in a few hours in Joe Nickell's experiment of 1982, which reproduced the condor at full size with stakes and cord in two days. The layout was done with stakes, whose holes and remains have been found at the ends of lines, and cords: a straight line by sighting along two stakes and setting a third, a curve by swinging a cord around a stake, the animals by enlarging a small drawing with a grid or by drawing the curves as arcs of circles, which the figures' geometry shows they were, with the centres marked. They have lasted because the pampa is one of the driest places on earth, with 20 minutes of rain a year, no wind at ground level because the stones absorb the sun's heat and hold a layer of warm air over the surface, and no people until the highway.

Who made them

The Nazca culture flourished in the valleys of the Río Grande de Nazca from about 100 BC to AD 650, a people of farmers and fishermen with no writing, cities of adobe, a ceremonial centre at Cahuachi of 40 pyramids, aqueducts of spiral wells (puquios) that still run, textiles and polychrome pottery painted with the same hummingbirds, killer whales, spiders and monkeys that are on the pampa, which is how the figures are dated; the Paracas culture before them, from 800 BC, made the hillside figures at Palpa, and the straight lines went on being made into the Wari period after 650. Radiocarbon dates from wooden stakes at the ends of lines give 525 AD plus or minus 80, and the pottery scattered along the lines, deliberately smashed, is Nazca. The whole complex was made over about a thousand years by a population of a few thousand, adding lines and figures over old ones, which is why the pampa is a palimpsest; the effort for any one figure was days, and for the whole about a hundred thousand person-days spread over centuries, less than one pyramid.

The theories

• An astronomical calendar (Kosok 1941, Reiche 1949–98). Paul Kosok, an American historian, saw the sun set at the end of a line on the winter solstice of 1941 and called the pampa "the largest astronomy book in the world"; Maria Reiche, a German mathematician, spent fifty years mapping and guarding the lines and held that the lines pointed to solstices and the figures to constellations, the monkey to the Big Dipper and the spider to Orion. Gerald Hawkins tested the alignments by computer in 1968 and found no more than chance, and the theory is now a minority view; some lines do mark the June solstice, which is the start of the water season.
• Water and the mountain gods (Reinhard 1985, Silverman, Aveni). The Nazca lived on water that came down from the Andes in a few weeks a year, and their cult, on their pottery and at Cahuachi, was of the mountains that sent it; Johan Reinhard showed that the lines point to water sources and to the mountains, that Andean peoples still walk straight lines to shrines to pray for rain, and that the trapezoids lie beside the rivers. Anthony Aveni and Helaine Silverman found that the ray centres lie on the edges of the valleys and that the lines connect them to water, and that the lines were walked: their surfaces are compacted by feet and pottery was broken along them as offerings. This is the mainstream view.
• Ritual paths and processions. The figures are single unbroken lines with an entrance and exit, made to be walked in procession, and the 2024 survey found the newly discovered small figures, of people, llamas and decapitated heads, along the paths where walkers would have seen them, arguing that the pampa was a landscape of ritual routes with images at the roadside; the large figures were for the gods above.
• Looms and textiles (Sawyer). The figures resemble Nazca textile designs and the lines the guide threads of a loom; suggestive of who designed them, not of purpose.
• Balloons (Woodman 1975). Jim Woodman flew a hot-air balloon of Nazca-style cloth over the pampa to show the makers could have seen their work; they had no need to, and no evidence of balloons exists.
• Runways for spacecraft (Däniken 1968). "Chariots of the Gods" called the trapezoids landing strips for alien visitors and the astronaut a portrait of one; the lines are a few centimetres deep in soft ground, useless for landing anything, the trapezoids are on hillsides, and the figures are the Nazca's own pottery animals at large scale. The theory sold millions of books and is why the lines are famous, and it has no evidence at all.

The 2024 AI survey and the new figures

Masato Sakai's team at Yamagata University, which has surveyed the pampa since 2004 and found 358 figures by 2020, trained a deep-learning model on the known figures and ran it over high-resolution aerial photographs of the whole pampa; in six months of field checks in 2022–23 it confirmed 303 new figures, nearly doubling the known total to 430 figures in one season, published in September 2024. The new ones are small, 9 m on average, of humans, domesticated animals, llamas, and severed heads, drawn as relief figures by piling stones rather than removing them, and they lie along the winding footpaths rather than the great lines; the large animal figures, by contrast, lie near the straight lines and trapezoids. Sakai reads two systems: small figures of people and heads along paths for individuals and small groups to see, made from about 100 BC, and the large animal figures and lines for community rituals; the survey also showed that the pampa has more figures still to find.

Damage, protection and how to see them

The Pan-American Highway was cut across the pampa in the 1930s, through the lizard; squatters, miners and the 4x4 tracks of tourists have scarred the edges; in December 2014 Greenpeace activists walked onto the hummingbird to lay out a slogan for the climate conference in Lima, leaving footprints in the crust that cannot be removed, for which Peru prosecuted them; in 2018 a truck driver drove across three figures, and in 2022 and 2023 more tracks were found. Maria Reiche paid guards from her own money from the 1950s, lived in a hut on the pampa, and got the first protection; UNESCO listed the site in 1994 and the state now patrols it with drones, but the area is too large to fence. To see the lines, the overflights from the Nazca or Pisco airfields, 30 to 90 minutes in small planes in the morning before the wind, show the whole set, with warnings about nausea and the safety record of the operators; the 13 m tower on the highway shows the hands, the tree and the lizard at ground level, the hill by the tower shows several lines, and the Maria Reiche museum in her old house explains it. December to March is the hot, hazy season; the lines are clearest in the early morning light.

Versions and theories: what is settled

• They can only be seen from the air. The figures, yes, as wholes; the lines can be seen from the surrounding hills and the ray centres, and the small figures at Palpa and the new ones are on slopes made to be seen from below. The makers did not need to fly; they needed a plan and a cord.
• They required a lost technology. Nickell's team reproduced the condor with sticks and string in two days; the Nazca had a thousand years.
• The astronaut is an alien. It is an owl-headed figure of the type on Paracas textiles, on a hillside like the older Palpa figures, made to be seen from the valley.
• They were made by one plan. They were made over a millennium by successive generations, crossing and overwriting each other, which any map shows.
• Nobody knows why. Nobody is certain; the evidence for water rituals and walked paths is strong and growing, and the calendar and the aliens have failed the tests. The Nazca have not been asked, having left no writing.
• They are disappearing. Erosion is slow, but the damage is from people; the lines that survived 2,000 years of desert have lost more in the last century than in all the rest.

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