AI discovers hundreds of ancient Nazca paintings in the Peruvian desert

With the help of artificial intelligence, hundreds of ancient drawings depicting decapitated human heads and domesticated llamas have been discovered in the Peruvian desert, and archaeologists have previously linked the works to the Nazca people, who began carving such drawings, called geoglyphs, into the ground about 2,000 years ago.

These geoglyphs are Nazca Lines Previously uncovered statues have depicted giant geometric shapes spanning several kilometers, as well as wild animals averaging about 300 feet (90 meters). The newly discovered statues generally depict humanoids or domesticated animals around 30 feet (9 meters) in length. Some depict decapitated heads and killer whales armed with blades, suggesting they were sacrificed.

“Pottery from the Nasca period depicts a killer whale with a knife decapitating a human,” he said. Masato Sakai “Killer whales can be positioned as creatures that offer human sacrifice,” say researchers from Yamagata University in Japan.

Sakai and his colleagues found the tiny geoglyphs by training an AI model to look for them in aerial photographs. The high-resolution photos cover an area roughly 10 times the size of Manhattan, including the Nazca Plateau and its surrounding areas, home to the Nazca Lines, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The AI ​​created a grid map that classified the probability that each grid square contained a geoglyph.

The researchers spent more than 2,600 hours manually inspecting the most likely photos and conducting on-site fieldwork, but the AI ​​helped speed up the screening process by 50 times “by eliminating 98% of the less likely aerial photos from consideration and providing a probability for the remaining 2%,” the co-authors say. Marcus Freitag At IBM Research in New York.

The researchers followed the AI’s suggestions and discovered a total of 303 figurative geoglyphs during field surveys in 2022 and 2023. Of these figures, 178 geoglyphs were identified individually by the AI. The other 66 were not directly identified, but the researchers found them within groups of geoglyphs highlighted by the AI.

“A complete map of the Nazca lines is not yet available, so AI-based analysis of remote sensing data is a major step forward,” he said. Kirsten Lamberth The researchers, from Leiden University in the Netherlands, cautioned: “But even with this powerful new technique, we’re still more likely to find geoglyphs that are more visible – that is, ones that are easier to spot – than those that are still difficult to find.”

Sakai said there are nearly 1,000 potential sites identified by AI that are waiting to be investigated in upcoming field surveys. These small geoglyphs typically appear on hills near winding paths and likely featured in “individual or small group ritual activities.” In contrast, the large linear geoglyphs were likely centers of community-wide rituals, Sakai said.

The AI ​​screening process also offers hope for discovering lines of art across a wider area of ​​the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site, the researchers say. David Beresford Jones The Cambridge researchers say the speed of the geoglyphs is crucial because many are “at risk of disappearing due to agricultural expansion, urban development and wind power.”