New mysterious lines have been discovered in the Palpa region in the south of Peru. 25 geoglyphs were found not far from the Nazca desert, which is already famous for its iconic lines that form almost 800 geometric shapes. These patterns represent deities and animals from the religious pantheons of Nazca, a pre-Inca civilization that was around between 300BC and 800AD.
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These geoglyphs, with lines that are too fine to see with the naked eye, were eventually mapped out using air drones. “In total we’re talking about 15 to 20 groups of images, and if we look at them individually, there are about 50 to 60 new figures,” explained the AFP Peruvian archeologist Johny Isla and his colleague Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, on the origin of this find.
The biggest figure of the new discoveries is 70 meters long and is made up of trenches, possibly formed by piling up sand, and they mainly represent living creatures, some geometric figures and even vegetation. Among these new discoveries in the Palpa region is an orca, a female dancer and a monkey. In comparison to the lines in Nazca, where the majority of images are only visible from the air, the Paracas patterns are located on the side of hills and slopes, meaning they can be seen from the ground.
The mystery remains
Experts are split on where the images came from. The newly discovered lines could be part of the Nazca culture which dominated the area from 200BC to 700AD but it has also been suggested that some of them could have been created by the Paracas and Topará cultures who lived there between 500BC and 200AD.
“This means that it is a tradition of over a thousand years that precedes the famous geoglyphs of the Nazca culture, which opens the door to new hypotheses about its function and meaning,” the curator of the region’s archeological sites, Johny Isla said to National Geographic.
The famous Nazca lines, made a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1994, are geoglyphs that date back more than 2,000 years and are still a mystery and enigma for experts. Although some people consider them to be part of an astronomical observatory site that could show star constellations, others think that they could be an astronomical calendar or prophecy system. Some even believe they could be giant weaving zones since these cultures didn’t have looms, so had to hold the string themselves and it is possible that these lines show where they stood. One thing is for sure, this Nazca site is still has more secrets for us to discover.
