Peru's Mysterious Nazca Lines May Have Been Modeled on Ancient Rock Formations

One of South America’s great mysteries is the purpose behind Peru’s Nazca Lines, a series of geoglyphs located in the middle of the desert that date back to the 5th century. We’re still not exactly sure why the Nazca people built them, but now we now know where they may have gotten the inspiration.

A paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains the existence of dozens of geoglyphs—essentially rock and earthen formations—in Peru’s Chincha Valley that predate the existence of the Nazca civilization, and were likely used as pointing devices to help people find towns and ancient markets.

The lines were likely built by the Paracas civilization as early as 300 BC and may have helped inspire the Nazca to build their famous lines, according to lead author Charles Stanish, a researcher at UCLA.

“We think they’re the antecedents to the Nazca, which was a bigger and more powerful civilization,” Stanish told me. “That’s important—it tells us that, before the Nazca, people were using these to create lines that narrow in on certain settlements. My interpretation is that they were pointing at something like a medieval fair, where goods were being sold.”

The Nazca Lines, a series of incredible formations that, when seen from above, look like animals (the monkey, spider, and condor are the most famous). Researchers aren’t exactly sure what the purpose of them was, but theorize that they were created to please the gods of the sky or for ritual purposes. The Paracas lines, meanwhile, appear to have had a strictly practical purpose.

Still, Stanish theorizes that the Nazca may have been inspired by the Paracas when they went about creating their lines. The Nazca lines are located roughly 200 kilometers south of where the Paracas lines were discovered, but Stanish says there may have been some overlap between the cultures.

“They Paracas [lines] are different from the Nazca in that they’re not anthropomorphic and human, they only had lines, but we know that 300-400 years before the Nazca, they were using this line technology to create highly ritualized landscapes,” he said.

Beyond being used to simply point towards towns and markets, Stanish discovered that some of the lines were oriented towards the sunset during the winter solstice in June, which suggests that the date held a special significance for the civilization.

“In Chincha, linear geoglyphs, platform mounds, and walls on those ceremonial mounds mark the June solstice. If it were only lines, then one could argue that the few solstice alignments were due to chance,” Stanish wrote. But the existence of platform mounds as well sugars that “there is little doubt that marking the June solstice is an Andean tradition that was part of the logic of ceremonial mound construction.”

Unfortunately, Stanish says, unlike the Nazca Lines, the Paracas site has been nearly destroyed by construction in the area. Peru, for better or worse, has an incredible number of archaeological sites, which can make building anything new there nearly impossible without harming some sort of ancient site. It’s one of the reasons why Peru is using drones to map all of the country’s known archaeological sites.

“That’s just how it is here,” he said.