A.I. Powers Discovery of Ancient Rock Art Showing Killer Whales and Two-Headed Snakes

Whale rock art, Nazca lines, Peru. A.I. is helping identify more such geoglyphs.Photo byWikimedia

Archaeologists from Yamagata University in Japan have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover four new Nazca geoglyphs in Peru.

The ancient Nazca people carved these geoglyphs into the rugged landscape of southern Peru between 500 BCE and 500 C.E.

The geoglyphs, numbering in the hundreds, show creatures, both real and imaginary including killer whales, two-headed snakes, llamas, and humanoid figures.

The Nazca geoglyphs were initially discovered by Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe in 1927 and gained renewed academic attention in the 1980s. In 1993, they were designated as a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site.

The recent discoveries, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, build upon the work initiated by Yamagata researchers in 2016, with initial surveys dating back to 2004.

The team first utilized high-resolution aerial photographs to capture the Nazca plateau, covering approximately 150 square miles.

Over five years, the researchers manually identified geoglyphs, cross-referencing their findings with on-site surveys.

In collaboration with IBM, they then employed AI technology to uncover geoglyphs that had been missed in previous searches.

The newly discovered geoglyphs include a figure holding a club, a wide-mouthed fish, a 255-foot-long pair of legs, and an abstract bird resembling the works of artist Alexander Calder.

The researchers explained in their paper that their approach allows deep learning algorithms to generate better representations of images, leading to the discovery of targets that were previously difficult to identify.

According to the researchers, using AI to identify new geoglyph candidates is 21 times faster than manual detection.

With Yamagata University's focus on a limited area of the Nazca plateau, their machine learning models are anticipated to make further discoveries shortly.