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If you visit one tourist site in Peru, it will almost certainly be the ruined Incan city of Machu Picchu. If you visit another, it’ll probably be the Nazca Desert, home to many large-scale geoglyphs made by pre-Inca peoples between 500 BC and 500 AD. Many of these “Nazca lines” are literally that, running across the desert floor in an abstract fashion, but others are figurative, depicting human beings, flora, fauna, and various less easily categorizable chimeras. The preservative effects of the climate kept many of these designs identifiable by the time moderns discovered them in 1927, and thanks to artificial-intelligence technology, researchers are finding new ones still today.

“A team from the Japanese University of Yamagata’s Nazca Institute, in collaboration with IBM Research, discovered 303 previously unknown geoglyphs of humans and animals, all smaller in size than the vast geometric patterns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Nazca plateau,” writes the Guardian’s Dan Collyns.

“The use of AI co*bined with low-flying drones revolutionized the speed and rate at which the geoglyphs were discovered, according to a research paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” and many more Nazca lines could remain to be identified with these methods.

The newly identified geoglyphs “include birds, plants, spiders, humanlike figures with headdresses, decapitated heads and an orca wielding a knife,” writes CNN’s Katie Hunt. She also cites hypotheses about why the original creators of these figures did the painstaking work of displacing stone after stone to create images mostly invisible to the human eye: it’s possible that “they formed a sacred space that was perhaps a place of pilgrimage. Other theories propose they played a part in calendars, astronomy, irrigation or for movement, such as running or dancing, or co*munication.” Some of them, surely, were meant only for the eyes of the gods, and so it may stand to reason that only our modern gods of artificial intelligence have been able to reveal them.

via Colossal

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.