Field Trip: Nazca Lines, Peru
Photo Illustration: Humanizing History Visuals. Photos: Wojciech Kocot, PsamatheM, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Welcome to Humanizing History™! Every month, we feature a central theme. Each week, we dive into different areas of focus.
This month’s theme: Summer Field Trip, Earth Etched
This week’s focus: Field Trip, where we highlight significant historic, archaeological, and cultural sites around the world
Today’s edition of Humanizing History™ is about 1,300 words, an estimated 4½-minute read.
The Why for This Week’s Topic
For our theme this month, we’re embarking on a journey of global field trips.
We’re exploring how people across time and place shaped land — carving or etching into earth, arranging natural materials — to tell stories, honor beliefs, and leave lasting imprints of cultural identity. And how the shaping of land is a shared human experience — bridging time and geography.
Different questions will guide us:
How have cultures around the world shaped the land to reflect their values, beliefs, and practical needs?
What can we learn — and still not know — about a society by examining how they interacted with their environment?
Why do some societies build on top of the land, while others build into it? Essentially, how do different materials (stone, earth, cliff, desert, etc.) influence or shape people’s choices?
To dive deeper into this topic, consider our inaugural monthly theme and its four newsletters: Land Shapes People and People Shape Land.
For our first newsletter, we stood among the pine-dotted valleys and cliffs — made of volcanic tuff — carved by Ancestral Puebloans of the U.S. American Southwest.
Last week, we traveled to northwest China, where an emperor ordered the construction of the Terracotta Army, a giant subterranean mausoleum — crafted from clay and earth, buried beneath the footprint of an ancient empire.
This week we head to the desert of Peru, to visit the Nazca Lines — a series of monumental geoglyphs etched on the desert surface by carving and clearing away rocks and pebbles to reveal the light earth beneath. These enormous drawings, some more than 2,000 years old, were carefully constructed across centuries. And many archaeologists around the world are still pondering why.
Nazca Lines
Location: Nazca Desert, southern Peru
Time period: According to UNESCO, around 500 BCE to 500 CE — about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago!
Virtually visit the Nazca Lines with this aerial view
Virtual Tour
Stretching across a vast terrain of arid desert — about 450 square kilometers (175 square miles) — the Nazca Lines cannot be seen all at once. In fact, depending on where you’re standing, what you’ll likely notice first is a sun-bleached plain, with low hills and mountains hovering close by. You may spot lines etched into the earth — the work of human hands. But to truly take them in, you’d need to climb a hill, or better yet, see them from the sky.
Considered one of the most arid regions of the world, the Nazca Desert provided ideal conditions for preserving many of these geoglyphs. With little to no rainfall and minimal wind erosion, hundreds of these carvings have lasted for over 1,500 years — some as long as 2,000.
The landscape itself offered the perfect canvas: “The ground is covered with a desert varnish — it’s these small pebbles and rocks that have this black patina on them. When you scrape away this darker layer, you reveal a lighter layer underneath. It’s a stark contrast, like a negative image.”
These massive line-based drawings feature human-like creatures, animals and insects — such as a condor, a monkey, a whale, and a spider. There are also geometric shapes: triangles, zigzags, and spirals.
To grasp their scale: this pelican geoglyph measures 475 by 108 feet — or about 145 meters by 33 meters!
Who meticulously made these geoglyphs? And why? Archaeologists have been pondering these questions for over a century.
Innovation Through Interaction with the Land
It’s widely believed that, across centuries, pre-Inca cultures or societies indigenous to South America were responsible for carving these geoglyphs.
Many sources credit the Nazca culture as the primary creators, with possible contributions or influences from the earlier Paracas culture, or perhaps even the Chavín, who preceded both.
It’s been estimated that most of the geoglyphs were created more than 1,500 years ago, with the unique geography of the desert region also playing a primary role: “The lines were created by removing the reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles that cover the surface of the Nazca desert and revealing the contrasting light-coloured earth underneath. It’s thought that small models were made, and then ropes and stakes were used to scale them up.”
Although the Nazca Lines had been known to local Peruvians, they came to global attention in the 20th century after a Peruvian archaeologist, Toribio Mejía Xesspe, spotted them “while hiking through the Nazca foothills” in the 1920s.
Since then, archeologists from across the world have studied the geoglyphs — from 20th century scholars, like Maria Reiche, a German-Peruvian archeologist and mathematician who proposed the lines had astronomical or calendrical purpose, to contemporary researchers like Masato Sakai, a Japanese archaeologist who uses drones and artificial intelligence to detect lesser-known or hard-to-spot geoglyphs.
Over the course of a century, more than 430 figurative geoglyphs have been identified. To this day, archaeologists are still working to decipher their full meaning.
The Nazca Lines, Representing Technological and Cultural Innovation
While we can’t say for sure what these colossal drawings — thick lines etched into the desert landscape — represent, they do speak to the larger human story: the evolving relationship between humans and our environment.
The Nazca People shaped the earth in ways that connected them to something larger than themselves. And, depending on how we interpret their efforts, human-environment interaction in this region may indeed represent a unique form of technological and cultural innovation.
In addition to the Nazca Lines, puquios — human-made, spiral-shaped aqueducts that funnel into the ground up to 15 meters (about 50 feet) deep — also dot the landscape.
It’s estimated that these puquios were built over 1,7000 years ago, and according to Ana Maria Cogorno, president of the Maria Reiche Association, the water system found in Nazca is unlike anything else in the world: “It’s a unique model in Peru. These types of aqueducts don’t exist elsewhere. They are almost like a spiral, like a constellation, let’s say, inverted. What they (the Nazca People) have done, first of all, is observe what was needed in a place as special as Nazca, a complete desert, and of course, water the most important thing.”
Out of the 42 known puquios, it’s estimated that 29 are still in operation, connecting to a larger canal system that continues to provide water for local farmers.
What do these puquios or spiral-shaped aqueducts have to do with the Nazca Lines?
While we may not be able to say for sure, some scholars suggest there may be a connection.
In addition to ceremonial and astronomical purposes, it’s also been proposed that the geoglyphs functioned as prayers for rain, or something that signified water. In the 1990s, archaeologist David Johnson — recognizing the critical role of water in the desert, and the historic droughts that impacted this region — theorized that the Nazca Lines may have been created or adapted as a “map of one of the world’s most sophisticated systems of water management.”
In the Nazca region, two main sources of water run underground. One source comes from rivers that flowed off the mountains before sinking beneath the surface. And the other source comes from geological fault lines, which — due to high seismic activity — pull water up from the deep water table.
After mapping the fault lines, Johnson noticed that puquios were often located near the faults, to tap them as water sources. And, as described in this video, “Right on top of the faults, in almost every case, [Johnson] finds Nazca Lines marking their paths.” This suggests that some geoglyphs may have marked essential underground water sources — vital not only for ancient desert dwellers, but also for those living in the region today.
While there still may be more questions than answers when studying the Nazca Lines, what’s clear is that the people who lived in this region took what may be viewed as harsh desert earth and built ingenious systems of water management, while also carving lines that can only be fully appreciated when viewed from above. Their vision — and their world — went below earth, across the land, and into the sky.
Next week, we continue our global field trips — journeying to another place on Earth where people shaped the land and the land shaped them in return.
Stay tuned!
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