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The first findings of the most detailed study yet by two British archaeologists into the Nazca Lines – enigmatic drawings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago in the Peruvian desert – have been published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity. As part of a five-year investigation, Dr Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and Professor Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester walked 1,500 km of desert in southern Peru, tracing the lines and geometric figures created by the Nasca people between 100 BC and AD 700. The confusing palimpsest of...

Manmade mounds shaped like orcas, condors and even a duck may be the oldest evidence of animal mounds outside of North America, according to former University of Missouri anthropologist. Writing in the magazine Antiquity, Robert Benfer, a professor emeritus, describes a series of mounds, some more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) across, in coastal valleys in Peru. Archaeological evidence at the sites pegs some at more than 4,000 years old. "It's going to shake everybody's views," Benfer told LiveScience. "The previous oldest animal figures were at Nazca and they're 2,000 years old." The Nazca Lines are simple stone outlines of...

They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public. They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands. Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes...

Along the Colorado River, a number of geoglyphs are carved out of the desert floor that are on par with the mysterious markings in the Peruvian desert near Nazca. However, the American “intaglios” are far less famous. The intaglios near Blythe, along the Colorado River along the California-Arizona border are the American equivalent of the Peruvian Nazca lines. Though never promoted as the airport for extraterrestrial beings, here are nevertheless the same geometric shapes, animals and humans, etched in the soil and best – and some of them only – visible from the sky. Geoglyphs can be found in a...

The mystery of why ancient South American peoples who created the mysterious Nazca Lines also collected human heads as trophies has long puzzled scholars who theorize the heads may have been used in fertility rites, taken from enemies in battle or associated with ancestor veneration. A recent study using specimens from Chicago's Field Museum throws new light on the matter by establishing that trophy heads came from people who lived in the same place and were part of the same culture as those who collected them. These people lived 2,000 to 1,500 years ago. Archaeologists determined that the severed heads...

Japanese researchers find new giant picture on Peru's Nazca Plateau The new Nazca Plateau image discovered by the research team from Yamagata University. (Photo courtesy of Yamagata University)A new giant picture on the Nazca Plateau in Peru, which is famous for giant patterns that can be seen from the air, has been discovered by a team of Japanese researchers. The image is 65 meters long, and appears to be an animal with horns. It is thought to have been drawn as a symbol of hopes for good crops, but there are no similar patterns elsewhere, and the type of the...