Archaeology

Drones Help Discover Desert Drawings in Palpa, near Nazca

Dancing girl and a monkey, a drawing maybe 2,000 years old on a Palpa hillside, and very different to the more geometric geoglyphs at Nazca. Source: Genry Emerson Bautista

Aerial photographs of over 50 ancient drawings in the desert near Nazca have been made public, following the completion of a research project funded by National Geographic.

The drawings cover a wide area in Palpa, 100km north of the famous Nazca Lines, and are several centuries older than the Nazca geoglyphs.  Some are believed to have been etched into the sand even earlier than the Paracas culture, which flourished between 700 BC and AD 200.

According to resident archaeologist Johny Isla, co-director of the Nazca-Palpa Project with Markus Reindel of the German Archaeological Institute, the new information will “open the door to new hypotheses” about the function and meaning of the drawings.

Isla and Reindel have been studying the geoglyphs since the 1990s, following on the work by Peruvian archaeologists as early as 1926 and by scientists Paul Kosok and Maria Reiche in the early 1940s . Reindel’s focus has been photogrammetric mapping of the entire Palpa and Nazca area, covering some 450 square kilometers (174 square miles), and both have published a series of articles and reports in scientific journals since then.

A killer whale on a Palpa hillside. Source: Johny Isla

At least 30 of the drawings were recorded prior to the recent discoveries, and  the tourist circuit has included some of the Palpa Lines as part of the aerial flight routes over the Nazca Lines.  The best-known Palpa find is probably the drawing of the killer whale, which Isla discovered  atop a hillside and has since restored to be clearly visible.

But the discovery of new geoglyphs occurred last year, when Luis Jaime Castillo, a professor at the Catholic University and former deputy minister of cultural heritage, worked with Isla to secure the support of National Geographic and the GlobalXplorer initiative, founded by archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.   Parcak’s proposal to use satellite imagery to help find and protect hidden heritage around the world won the TED Prize in 2016, which allowed her to crowdsource and launch GlobalXplorer.

“When we were thinking about countries to go to … it had to be a country that everyone in the world would know is important, where the Ministry of Culture would be open to new technology, and where most of the sites would be out in the open and fairly easy to detect,” Parcak told National Geographic. “Peru definitely fit the bill.”

GlobalXplorer satellites can see small, foot-wide objects from 383 miles above the earth, and the complimentary work is done by drones, which flying less than 200 fet above the ground can zoom into tiny objects, according to Castillo.

Castillo is a drone enthusiast, using them to discover and map out archaeological sites for conservation, and worked on the Palpa project with students from the Catholic University. In 2016, the Ministry of Culture began a program to register the nation’s archaeological sites using drones and satellite imagery.

Figures from the Paracas era. Source: Genry Emerson Bautista

Many of the Palpa drawings are on hillsides, some fairly easy to see from the valleys or roadsides below, contrary to most of the Nazca Lines, which stretch over flat desert plains.   But many were worn with time — some over 2000 years old, after all —  and the GlobalXplorer platform has allowed the archaeologists to discover beyond what often appeared to be just thin, vague lines in the desert.

2 Comments

  1. Maarten Dikkers

    There is a huge difference between an drawing in the sand and a Nazca figure.
    All the Nazca figures are made with one interrupted line. So all the new found drawings are drawings and not a Nazca figure.

  2. This writer wonders if the Nazca Lines and the hillside drawings were used by early civilizations to enable people in hot air balloons to navigate. They had cloth, they had science, and surely knew that hit air rises. Just a question, maybe I am completely wrong.

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