The Nazca lines: drawings for the sky

There is no single night in this file. There is a plain, and a very long afternoon.

The place is the desert of southern Peru, around Nasca and Palpa, where UNESCO lists the Lines and Geoglyphs[unesco-700] as a World Heritage site. It is one of the driest landscapes on Earth, and that dryness is the whole reason this case exists. Marks made on that ground have stayed.

Scene · reconstructed from the paperworkPicture it. A flat, stony surface running toward the foothills. On it, straight lines that run on and on, as if ruled across the desert. Broad cleared shapes, trapezoids and triangles. And among them, figures: animals, plants, shapes drawn large enough that they are easiest to take in from above. The UNESCO listing[unesco-700] describes these as geoglyphs, drawings made in the ground itself.

The file doesn't give us a moment of first sighting, because there wasn't one. People crossing the pampa had always walked past these marks. What the file does give us is the method, which is plain enough to explain in a sentence: the dark surface stones were cleared away to expose the lighter ground beneath, and the line remained. The UNESCO description[unesco-700] covers that technique and the cultures behind it, and the dossier's analysis puts the point simply: the geoglyphs, their technique and their cultural context are documented[unesco-700].

Those cultures are not a mystery. The UNESCO listing[unesco-700] ties the geoglyphs to the peoples who lived in these valleys and dates them to the centuries around the turn of the era; the exact wording of that date range is on the file's to-verify list[unesco-700], so I give it loosely.

And the count is not fixed. In 2024 a team combining artificial intelligence with fieldwork confirmed 303 new figurative geoglyphs[sakai-2024-pnas] in six months, which the university's press release[yamagata-2024-press] described as nearly doubling the number known. The desert is still giving up drawings.

I find that the most remarkable part of the opening scene. This is not a lost moment we are trying to reconstruct. The drawings are lying there in daylight. What we lack is not the object, but the reason.

How the modern world came to study them is a story of a few people with notebooks, and it begins in the 1940s.

The paper trail of Nazca is modern, and short enough to set out in order.

• Kosok, c. 1939–41. The historian Paul Kosok surveyed the lines in the field[kosok-1965] and noted that one aligned with the solstice sunset[kosok-1965]. His observations appear in his book Life, Land and Water in Ancient Peru[kosok-1965], published in 1965. The exact years of his fieldwork are on the to-verify list[kosok-1965], along with the edition and pages.
• Reiche, 1949. Maria Reiche, who would map the lines for decades[reiche-1949], published her first book on them, Mystery on the Desert[reiche-1949], in 1949. Her long work on the pampa is a large part of why so much of the site was measured at all.
• The runway book, 1968. Erich von Däniken's Erinnerungen an die Zukunft[vondaniken-1968], published in English as Chariots of the Gods?, presented the lines as landing strips for visitors. That book belongs on the paper trail because it changed how the public saw the site; it belongs in the next chapter because of what it claimed.
• UNESCO, 1994. The Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa were inscribed as World Heritage[unesco-700], listing 700. The inscription sets out the geoglyphs, their dating and their significance, and the file confirms the listing's name and year.
• The AI survey, 2024. On 23 September 2024, Sakai and colleagues published in PNAS[sakai-2024-pnas]: an AI-assisted survey plus fieldwork confirmed 303 new figurative geoglyphs. The university's press release[yamagata-2024-press] followed the next day, and the news carried it widely, from The Guardian[guardian-2024-nazca] to a New Scientist video[newscientist-nazca-yt].

Look at that list and notice what kind of paper it is. It is not a government file, and nothing was hidden. It is survey notes, books, a heritage listing and a peer-reviewed paper. The trail is open, and it is still being written.

Three of the five entries are archaeologists and surveyors trying to explain the lines. One is a writer offering a very different explanation. That one became the most famous, and it is where the story turns.

The turn in this file came from outside archaeology, and it came with a question that sounds reasonable at first hearing.

In 1968 Erich von Däniken presented the lines as runways or signals for visitors[vondaniken-1968] from the sky. If the drawings are easiest to see from above, the argument went, perhaps they were made for someone above. His book popularised the runway reading[vondaniken-1968] around the world, and for many people it is still the first thing they hear about Nazca.

It is a fair question to ask, and the Archive owes it a fair answer. Archaeologists reject the runway idea. The dossier's other-side note gives their reasons in brief: the soft ground, and the lines' ritual context[vondaniken-1968]. Ground that would not bear a landing is a poor runway. Lines that sit inside a landscape of the known Nasca and Palpa cultures[unesco-700] are better explained by the people who lived beside them.

I want to be careful about the second half of the argument too, the part about seeing from above. Aerial photographs are how most of us know these lines, and they are spectacular. But how we see a thing now is not necessarily how it was meant to be seen. The 2024 survey[sakai-2024-pnas] worked from aerial imagery precisely because that is the efficient modern way to find figures, and then confirmed them on the ground.

There was also a turn inside the science. Kosok's solstice alignment[kosok-1965] suggested the desert might be a kind of calendar, and Reiche's decades of mapping[reiche-1949] pursued astronomy as an answer. That reading is no longer the leading one; the dossier frames the open debate instead around ritual walking and water, as its open question[unesco-700] puts it.

So the case turned twice. Once, in popular imagination, toward visitors from the sky. Once, in scholarship, away from a single tidy explanation and toward a landscape used for many things.

The Archive files the who, when and how as explained. The why is what remains.

Here is what the documents do not settle.

• What the lines were for. The analysis is clear about the boundary: the geoglyphs, their technique and context are documented; their purpose is debated[unesco-700].
• Walking or water, or both. The file's open question asks whether the lines were paths for ritual walking, water markers, or both[unesco-700]. The answer may differ from line to line, and across centuries.
• The calendar idea. Kosok's solstice sunset alignment[kosok-1965] is a real observation. Whether it reflects intent, or simply one line among many happening to point somewhere, is a question the file does not settle.
• How many there are. The 2024 survey's 303 new figures[sakai-2024-pnas] show the count is still rising. Every new figure is a new piece of evidence for the purpose debate.
• The old books. The links to Kosok[kosok-1965], Reiche[reiche-1949] and von Däniken[vondaniken-1968] are still archive searches; editions and pages are on the to-verify list.

The runway answer is not on this list, and that is deliberate. The dossier records it fairly, with the reasons archaeologists reject it[vondaniken-1968]. It is part of the history of the site, not one of its open questions.

What I like about this file is that the mystery is honest. We know who made the lines, roughly when, and how. We have a UNESCO listing[unesco-700], decades of surveys and a peer-reviewed count[sakai-2024-pnas] that keeps growing. What we do not have is the makers' own explanation, and we may never get one in words.

The makers are known. The method is known. The meaning is still being walked. The listing, the studies and the timeline are below.