[2][3] They were created between 500 BC and 500 AD by people making depressions or shallow incisions in the desert floor, removing pebbles and leaving different-colored dirt exposed.

Hundreds are simple lines and geometric shapes; more than 70 are zoomorphic designs, including a hummingbird, arachnid, fish, condor, heron, monkey, lizard, dog, cat, and a human.

The main concentration of designs is in a 10 by 4 km (6 by 2 mi) rectangle, south of the hamlet of San Miguel de la Pascana.

[citation needed] The first published mention of the Nazca Lines was by Pedro Cieza de León in his book of 1553, and he described them as trail markers.

[19] Paul Kosok, an American historian from Long Island University in New York, is credited as the first scholar to study the Nazca Lines in depth.

They proposed that the figures were designed as astronomical markers on the horizon to show where the sun and other celestial bodies rose on significant dates.

[20] Joe Nickell, an American investigator of the paranormal, religious artifacts, and folk mysteries, reproduced the figures in the early twenty-first century by using the same tools and technology that would have been available to the Nazca people.

[22] With careful planning and simple technologies, Nickell proved that a small team of people could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance.

When this gravel is removed, the light-colored clay earth exposed in the bottom of the trench contrasts sharply in color and tone with the surrounding land surface, producing visible lines.

In total, the earthwork project is huge and complex: the area encompassing the lines is nearly 450 km2 (170 sq mi), and the largest figures can span nearly 370 m (1,200 ft).

[25] In March 2012, the university announced that it would open a new research center at the site in September 2012, related to a longterm project to study the area for the next 15 years.

[26] A June 2019 article in Smithsonian magazine describes recent work by a multi-disciplinary team of Japanese researchers who identified or re-identified some of the birds depicted.

[3] The field survey took place between September 2022 and February 2023 and was conducted on foot for ground truthing under the permission of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture.

Paul Kosok and Maria Reiche advanced a purpose related to astronomy and cosmology, as has been common in monuments of other ancient cultures: the lines were intended to act as a kind of observatory, to point to the places on the distant horizon where the sun and other celestial bodies rose or set at the solstices.

By 1998, Phyllis B. Pitluga, a protégé of Reiche and senior astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, had concluded that the animal figures were "representations of heavenly shapes."

[40] In 1985, archaeologist Johan Reinhard published archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrating that worship of mountains and other water sources predominated in Nazca religion and economy from ancient to recent times.

He theorized that the lines and figures were part of religious practices involving the worship of deities associated with the availability of water, which directly related to the success and productivity of crops.

[citation needed] Henri Stierlin, a Swiss art historian specializing in Egypt and the Middle East, published a book in 1983 linking the Nazca Lines to the production of ancient textiles that archeologists have found wrapping mummies of the Paracas culture.

[41] He contended that the people may have used the lines and trapezes as giant, primitive looms to fabricate the extremely long strings and wide pieces of textiles typical of the area.

[42] Based on the results of geophysical investigations and the observation of geological faults, David Johnson argued that some geoglyphs followed the paths of aquifers from which aqueducts (or puquios) collected water.

Another is related to calendrical purpose, as proved by the presence of radial centers aligned along the directions of winter solstice and equinox sunset.

[46] Phyllis Pitluga, senior astronomer at the Adler Planetarium and a protégé of Reiche, performed computer-aided studies of star alignments.

Pitluga never laid out the criteria for selecting the lines she chose to measure, nor did she pay much attention to the archaeological data Clarkson and Silverman had unearthed.

Her case did little justice to other information about the coastal cultures, save applying, with subtle contortions, Urton's representations of constellations from the highlands.

According to Von Däniken, Sanskrit literature describes a story in which an aircraft landed on Earth, and the local people watched in amazement as "human-like beings with golden, shimmering skins" walked, mined for metals and then flew away in their ship.

The amazed Native Americans then considered Nazca a place of pilgrimage and generations of their people built more figures and runways as an invitation for gods to return, but they never did.

At the time of Erich von Däniken's publishing of Chariots of the Gods?, scientists and archeologists such as Maria Reiche declared that his ideas were absurd and should be discarded.

[citation needed] The Lines themselves are superficial, they are only 10 to 30 cm (4 to 12 in) deep and could be washed away... Nazca has only ever received a small amount of rain.

[56] The Greenpeace incident also directed attention to other damage to geoglyphs outside of the World Heritage area caused in 2012 and 2013 by off-road vehicles of the Dakar Rally,[57] which is visible from satellite imagery.

[61] Their co-discoverer, Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, indicates that many of these newly discovered geoglyphs represent warriors.