The Nazca people scratch the first geoglyphs into the Peruvian desert

Story: 500 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 14, 0001

Sometime around the fifth century B.C.E., people living along the arid coastal plain of what is now southern Peru began moving stones. Not to build walls or temples, but to clear the reddish-brown surface rock and expose the pale yellow-grey earth beneath — creating lines, shapes, and figures that would endure for more than two millennia.

Key findings

• Nazca Lines: The geoglyphs cover an estimated 170 square miles (450 square kilometers) of desert in southern Peru, numbering in the thousands and depicting animals, plants, geometric shapes, and figures from the human imagination.
• Earliest geoglyphs: The oldest lines were made by piling stones rather than scraping earth, and date to approximately 500 B.C.E. — with the great majority created between 200 B.C.E. and 500 C.E.
• Nazca culture: The people who made most of the lines were skilled desert engineers who developed techniques to bring underground water to the surface for irrigation, and built the ceremonial center of Cahuachi — a city of more than 40 mounds and adobe pyramids that overlooks some of the geoglyphs.

Lines in the desert

The technique was simple and the result was extraordinary. Workers removed the iron-oxide-coated stones from the desert surface, stacking them along edges to reveal lighter-colored ground underneath. Because the Peruvian coastal desert is one of the driest and most windless places on Earth, what they made stayed intact. The lines did not wash away. The piles did not scatter. The figures simply remained.

The images they created range from the geometric to the zoomorphic. Spirals, triangles, and rectangles sit alongside a hummingbird, a spider, a monkey, a lizard, a pelican, and what researchers identify as a killer whale. Some figures are enormous — a cat discovered in 2020 C.E. measured roughly 121 feet (37 meters) from nose to tail. Others are smaller and subtler. An aerial survey announced in 2022 C.E. revealed 168 previously undocumented geoglyphs, including one depicting a headless person whose severed head tumbled beside the body.

Researchers are still finding new ones.

Who made them and why

The Nazca were a prehistoric culture — meaning they left no written records. That silence has made the purpose of the lines one of archaeology’s most enduring open questions.

Several serious hypotheses have emerged. Some researchers connect the lines to astronomical observation, noting that certain lines appear to align with celestial bodies or constellations. Others argue the lines functioned as pilgrimage routes leading to sacred sites, particularly Cahuachi, which served as a major ceremonial center for the region. A third and widely discussed theory links the lines to water — specifically to the rituals surrounding rainfall and the underground aquifers the Nazca people worked so hard to access.

The Nazca were sophisticated hydraulic engineers. They built a system of underground aqueducts called puquios — spiral-shaped access shafts that tapped into subsurface water and channeled it to fields. In one of the driest inhabited regions on Earth, this was a matter of survival. It is not hard to imagine that water shaped their cosmology as profoundly as it shaped their agriculture.

A discovery made on foot

Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe became the first person to study and formally report the Nazca Lines after encountering them on foot in 1927 C.E. In the decades that followed, growing air traffic over the region brought the lines to wider attention, and by mid-century they had become one of Peru’s most recognized archaeological sites.

A persistent myth holds that the lines are only visible from the air. Research published in 2007 C.E. found that every single geoglyph studied in the Palpa region could be seen from the ground. The aerial view makes their scale and geometry more legible — but the lines were made by people walking, and walking people could see them.

The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994 C.E., recognizing its outstanding universal value and the need for its protection.

Lasting impact

The Nazca Lines changed how modern humans understand what prehistoric societies were capable of — and what motivated them. They are evidence that the drive to mark the world, to create meaning at vast scale without written language or metal tools, is not unique to any single civilization. Cultures across the ancient world — from the builders of Stonehenge to the mound-builders of North America — engaged in monumental landscape modification whose full significance we still do not understand.

The Nazca Lines have also shaped the scientific study of geoglyphs globally. Methods developed for studying them — including aerial photography, satellite imaging, and LiDAR — have been applied to find and analyze similar features in dozens of countries. In that sense, the desert of southern Peru became something of a proving ground for landscape archaeology as a discipline.

For Peru, the lines remain a living part of national and regional identity, and a major source of cultural tourism that funds ongoing conservation and research. Local and Indigenous communities in the region have long maintained connections to the land where the lines were made, even as the dominant frameworks for studying them have historically been international and academic. Efforts to include Peruvian voices in interpretation and stewardship have grown in recent decades, though unevenly.

Blindspots and limits

The lines’ purpose remains genuinely unknown, and the lack of written records means that gap may never fully close. Some of the most dramatic interpretations — including fringe claims about alien construction — have crowded out serious public engagement with the actual complexity of Nazca culture and its achievements. The people who made these marks were not mysterious; they were skilled, organized, and deeply knowledgeable about their environment. The mystery lies in the meaning, not the makers.

For more from Good News for Humankind, visit the Good News for Humankind archive on Peru.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Live Science — The Nazca Lines

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized at COP30
• Ghana establishes marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• The Good News for Humankind archive on Peru

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