Over 150 new ancient designs found in Peru's Nazca Lines add to 2,000-year-old mystery

Researchers have discovered another 168 pictures at the Nazca Lines in Peru – pretty interesting stuff given that we still don’t conclusively know why any of them were created.

The Nazca Lines, in case you’re not already aware, are a selection of mysterious geoglyphs depicting a number of things from millennia ago that keep showing up in the Peruvian desert.

When we say they keep showing up, that doesn’t mean that people are still out there drawing them, it’s just that the area that they’re in is so vast and remote that we haven’t discovered them all yet.

That’s why 168 new ones have just been found in recent weeks, and the mystery around them keeps increasing.

Yamagata University

The drawings were made by removing black rocks strategically to expose the differently coloured dirt beneath them, and were usually situated around ancient trails travelled by the Nazca people.

Even the date of their creation is up for discussion, given that the Nazca were around in that area between about 200 BCE until 600 BCE, and the designs are thought to be from about 100BCE to 300CE.

That’s a 400 year discrepancy there, which is unusual in modern science, but not so unusual in archaeology.

The researchers from Yamagata University – working with local Peruvian archaeologists – used high resolution aerial photography methods and images captured by drones to identify the new images.

Other images show things like cats, snakes, orca whales, and other creatures, as well as human figures as well.

Yamagata University

These ones are a bit smaller than many of the others, meaning they can be seen from the ground.

Others can only be seen properly from the air, adding to the intrigue surrounding them, given that we assume the Nazca would not have been able to fully see what they’d created.

This latest find fits in nicely next to another set of 190 that were discovered between 2004 and 2018, which led to the 2017 establishment of a national park in the area by the Peruvian Ministry of Culture.

As we’ve mentioned, no-one actually knows why the geoglyphs were created, but theories abound.

Some think that they were used for irrigation, others have said that they could be an astrological calendar or possibly that they have a religious connotation, depicting the deities of the Nazca.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about them – and why the research is so fascinating – is that we simply don’t know.

Problematically, the incredible images could be in danger due to human threats as well as natural issues.

Yamagata University

The huge area that the images are in makes it hard to conserve them all properly, but there are also incursions from urban and economic developments as well.

Masato Sakai, a professor from Yamagata University, told Reuters: "Some geoglyphs are in danger of being destroyed due to the recent expansion of mining-related workshops in the archaeological park.”

Hopefully the area can be studied and preserved properly so that one day we might actually understand a bit better why these intriguing images were made, and discover further insights into the people who put them there.