The Nazca etched hundreds of giant animals and perfectly straight lines running for miles into one of the driest places on Earth, where they've survived two millennia almost untouched. A German mathematician gave her whole life to protecting and decoding them; von Däniken claimed they were alien runways. Now AI is finding hundreds more that human eyes had walked straight past.
The full survey: over 800 straight lines, 300 geometric figures, and 70 plant and animal designs raked into the Pampa between roughly 500 BC and AD 500 by scraping away the dark surface stones.
National Geographic on the sheer physical feat — how a society working by hand under a relentless sun laid out figures so large and so precise that their makers could never have seen them whole.
History Time's deep dive into the Nazca people themselves — their severed-head iconography, their desperate relationship with water, and how both may be written into the lines.
Maria Reiche slept in the dirt beside the lines for decades, swept them clean with a broom, and fought off tomb raiders and dreamers alike to keep her 'calendar in the sand' from being destroyed.
A feature-length walk through a century of investigation — from the first aviators who spotted the figures in the 1920s to the archaeologists still arguing over what the Nazca were trying to say.
The life of the woman who made the lines her obsession: her theory that they mapped the stars, her ladder-and-camera surveys, and the airport named for her when she died.
Le Monde on the lesser-known geoglyphs at nearby Palpa — older, carved onto hillsides rather than flats, and hinting that the Nazca inherited the practice from a culture before them.
In 2024 a Japanese team with IBM turned AI loose on aerial imagery and nearly doubled the known catalogue of figurative geoglyphs — proof the Pampa is still only partly read.