During an archaeological study on the territory of Nazca lines in the hinterland of Peru (about 450 km south of the capital Lima), promoted byYamagata University and fromUniversity of Michiganthe researchers, thanks to the use ofartificial intelligence in the analysis of aerial photographs of the terrain, they managed to identify well in six months 303 new geoglyphs. A geoglyph, from the Greek “geo“, “earth” and “glifé“, “engraving”, is a great one figurative representation on the ground. The site of Nazca, with its geoglyphs hundreds of meters large, is a well-known one UNESCO heritage sitebut the study by Masato Sakai, Akihisa Sakurai, Siyuan Lu, Jorge Olano, Conrad M. Albrecht, Hendrik F. Hamann, and Marcus Freitag made it possible to identify hundreds of minor geoglyphswhich would otherwise have been difficult to discover and which they almost have doubled the number of those known to date.
This is not the only case of applying artificial intelligence to archaeology: in Italy, for example, AI is helping to decipher the papyri of Erocolano with the Vesuvius Challenge project.
What are the Nazca lines
UNESCO heritage since 1994the Nazca lines are located in Southern Peru. There are hundreds of them drawings traced on the ground on horseback between the 1st millennium BC and the 1st millennium AD The lines are considered one of the greatest expressions of Nazca civilizationwhich flourished in Peru between the 1st century. BC and the 6th century. AD, well before the advent of civilization Inca.
The lines are composed of both geometric figures which gives representations from natural worldlike the condor, the flower, the dog, and the spider, just to name the best known, but also human depictions. Experts of this ancient Andean civilization believe that these great images, visible only from the sky and the surrounding hillswere a way that allowed the Nazca to communicate with your deities. Others believe that their realization was linked to the water cult (the Nazca desert is one of the driest areas in the world) or that it was a astronomical calendar.
Unfortunately today the site runs a risk great for his conservation. The large number of tourists which reaches the place on board off-roadand the inability to recognize drawings from the ground led to destruction or to damage of many geoglyphs.
The use of artificial intelligence to identify new geoglyphs
Japanese and US researchers carried out experiments flying with drones above the Nazca desert. Aerial images collected during the flights were subsequently processed through models trained to recognize the contrast between the terrain and the specially drawn lines. Most geoglyphs identified they are smaller compared to the best-known ones (maximum ten meters), and this made the work of artificial intelligence even more useful.
At the end of the study, it lasted 6 monthshave been registered 303 new geoglyphsAlmost doubling the total number of those known to date. The 403 Peruvian geoglyphs known to date had been discovered over the course of a century. The new findings of the Japanese-American working group have made it possible to broaden the repertoire of known images: new depictions of human figures, including some depicting the domestication of species such as the llama ei human sacrificesbut also other marine and terrestrial animals.
The researchers proposed based on the differences of dimensions and of manufacturing techniques (some are a reliefwhile others are simply composed of lines traced on the ground) that the geoglyphs had different functions. The larger ones, made up of lines drawn on the ground, would have had a religious functionwhile the smaller ones, in relief, also have a larger repertoire of images specificthey would have served as communication method between the different communities that inhabited the desert valleys.
