Yamagata University unearths 303 Nazca Lines in Peru

Yamagata University said Tuesday it has newly identified 303 Nazca Lines geoglyphs in southern Peru.
The national university, which has a research institute focused on the World Heritage drawings, added that the Nazca Lines are highly likely to have been created for the purposes of rituals and information sharing.
The findings were published in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the same day.
Yamagata University identified the geoglyphs using artificial intelligence technology in cooperation with IBM Research of the United States.
Researchers found the drawings through field surveys conducted from September 2022 and February 2023 of sites selected with the AI technology from aerial photographs.
This method helped them find the geoglyphs significantly faster than through the conventional method of the naked eye, the university said.
Masato Sakai, professor of cultural anthropology and Andean archaeology at the university, and others also used the AI technology to analyze the scale and distribution of geoglyphs that had already been discovered.

They found that large-scale line geoglyphs around 90 meters in length, on average, and mostly depicting wild animals were drawn near pilgrimage routes to temples, leading them to believe that the geoglyphs were drawn for community-level rituals.
The newly discovered geoglyphs were smaller, averaging around 9 meters in size.
They depict humans, human heads and livestock, using rocks arranged on a plane.
The smaller geoglyphs, often found near a small path, are believed to have been created by individuals and small groups to share information about rituals and livestock.
“We may be able to decipher what people thought in a world without writing,” Sakai said.