A pair of legs up to 78 meters long, a 19-meter fish or a 17-meter bird have been discovered in the Peruvian desert by a team from IBM Japan and researchers from Yamagata University who have used Intelligence Artificial to discover these new figures of the famous ‘Nazca Lines’.
The experts used deep learning algorithms for five years to scan a large number of aerial photographs capturing parts of the Nazca desert, the uninhabited coastal area in southern Peru that is especially known for its ancient works of art etched into its landscape. .
As explained in an article published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, using this technique, scientists claim that they can discover potential geoglyphs around 21 times faster than with the naked eye. It is achieved by analyzing vast visual data banks and learning to understand which features are associated with certain categories, which in this case are the lines of the Nazca desert.
“Deep learning is an automatic method that builds and trains neural networks, which are inspired by the interconnection of nerve cells in the brain, to enable computers to learn the characteristics of large amounts of data and subsequently make predictions or decisions. ”, the researchers from Yamagata University explain in a statement.
“This demonstrates high performance in tasks such as image recognition, speech processing, and natural language processing,” they add. “Object detection through deep learning automatically identifies specific classes of objects from images and determines their location, size, and classification,” they add.
The ‘Nazca Lines’ are a group of geoglyphs found in the Nazca desert, between the towns of Nazca and Palpa, which were created in a period of 1,000 years between 500 BC and 500 AD. Hundreds of these mysterious carvings have been discovered over the past century.
These works were made by carving deep depressions into the ground, which removes the top layer of iron-rich reddish soil to reveal a lighter-colored subsoil. Natural motifs such as animals (including fish, birds, insects, lizards, dogs, cats, monkeys, and humans) as well as plants, trees, and flowers are common.
Some images are more supernatural, including two-faced humanoid monsters and giant two-headed snakes that eat people. Some researchers have theorized that they had some kind of astronomical significance or that they were works dedicated to the gods. But most archaeologists now believe that they were probably used for ceremonial processions along the outlines of the figures.
Technicians from Yamagata University, who have been searching for geoglyphs in Nazca since 2004, already used this system in 2019 to precisely identify a humanoid figure that measured about four meters long and two meters wide. In Nazca more than 350 geoglyphs have been found. The first were detected by airplane pilots in the 1920s.
Finding these ancient Nazca Lines is now more important than ever because many of the works face destruction, especially from erosion and climate change. “It is imperative to identify and protect as many geoglyphs as possible,” the authors write.
