What do we have here?

Can you imagine being a part of a culture before planes, drones, and aerial photography? Before you could see the world from above? Instead the best view you could claim was from climbing mountains and hills to survey the landscape below.

Now imagine that, onto this landscape, you inscribed drawings that you would never see.

That is how the Nazca lines were created: by people with their feet planted firmly on the ground, without GPS or aerial assistance to perfect their massive drawings.

The Nazca lines span approximately 170 square miles in southern Peru (about 250 miles south of Lima, Peru) These colossal inscriptions are estimated to be 2,000 years old, created by a Peruvian civilization that pre-dates the Incas. In total there are approximately 1,000 recorded drawings, a combination of over 800 straight lines, 300 geometric designs, and more than 70 animal and plant glyphs. As recently as 2019 over 140 new lines were discovered.

The designs were drawn onto the ground of one of the driest places on earth. The builders used two methods to inscribe their drawings onto the hard ground. In one version, the top 12 to 15 inches of rust-colored pebbles, coated in iron oxide, were scraped away and stacked to the sides of the lines, clearing way for the lighter desert sand below to show through. The second version was more of an outline in which only the border of the figure was scraped away in the same manner.

To this day there is much speculation as to the purpose of the lines, and no concrete conclusions have been reached. Multiple researchers have confirmed that the lines could have astrological significance, some suggest that they were part of a ritual to call down water to the dry land, others posit them as ritual processional routes.