New insights into Peru’s mysterious Nazca geoglyphs suggest that
the lines may have once been a labyrinth with a spiritual
purpose. Two scientists have decided to use a low-tech method
for exploring these ancient drawings. They walked them. Created
sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500, the giant ground
drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru, comprise several hundred line
figures, some geometric shapes along with a variety of animal
representations that altogether cover an area of nearly 500
square kilometers (193 square miles). The lines were made by
removing the Nazca desert surface such that the lighter earth
below is revealed. “To appreciate what they might have meant to
ordinary people, then you have to walk them,” said Thimothy
Ingold, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Aberdeen.
“People were not looking at this stuff from the air, they were
looking at stuff from the ground level,” he added. Starting in
2007, archaeologists Clive Ruggles from the University of
Leicester in the United Kingdom and h