A Japanese scientific study using artificial intelligence (AI) has discovered some 303 new geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru, almost doubling the known number of these mysterious lines more than 2,000 years old .
“Using artificial intelligence in research has allowed us to map the distribution of geoglyphs in a faster and more precise way,” said archaeologist Masato Sakai of Yamagata University, presenting on Monday the results of the study during a press conference at the Japanese Embassy in Lima.
Mr. Sakai specified that these results were the result of joint work between the Nasca Institute of this university and IBM Research.
“The traditional survey method of visually identifying geoglyphs from high-resolution images of this vast area was slow and carried the risk of missing some,” the scientist said.
The study was endorsed by the scientific community and was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the prestigious journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
According to the article, “AI-accelerated research identified 303 new geoglyphs in six months of fieldwork.”
Among the figures discovered, we find “giant geoglyphs of linear type” which “mainly represent wild animals”, but also “small ones” in relief with “patterns linked to human activity, including humans and camelids domesticated.”
To discover these 303 formations, it was necessary to “analyze a large quantity of geospatial images produced by aircraft,” explains the study.
“This represents a 16-fold increase in the discovery rate thanks to IBM’s AI” and shows how this technology accelerates discoveries in fields such as archaeology, notes the article in the American scientific journal.
The study recalls that the discovery of the 430 Nazca geoglyphs known before this discovery took almost a century.
Dating back around two millennia, the famous Nazca Lines, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, depict geometric figures and animal silhouettes that can only be seen from the sky.
The real meaning of these geoglyphs remains an enigma: some researchers see them as an astronomical observatory, others as a calendar.
The site of the Nazca Lines is located approximately 400 kilometers south of Lima, in the desert. The first geoglyphs were discovered in 1927.
People from the Nazca civilization occupied the area from 200 to 700 AD.
