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Ancient Peru Shields Its Secrets With Technology
Ever looked up at a cloud and thought, “Hey, that looks like an elephant!” Or perhaps a hill that looked like a sleeping giant? When I first learned about the Nazca geoglyphs in Peru, I had a thought like that. These giant, ancient sketches, scratched into the ground, are so vast that you can only appreciate them in their entirety from the air. For years, archaeologists puzzled over the question, “Who created these? Why did they make these? And… are there more?”
It turns out, there are many more. And who has helped find them? Not humans alone, but Artificial Intelligence — a tool that has a strange ability to identify the invisible. Isn’t that ironic? That something human-made is allowing us to discover something ancient and natural. So let me tell the story in the most Indian “chai pe charcha” style. You’ll find out how interesting this is indeed.
The Nazca Lines: Background Information for the Inquisitive
Now before jumping to the AI part, let us know the stars of this story. The Nazca Lines are a collection of huge, archaic geoglyphs — huge-drawn drawings chiseled into the desert in Peru. They were made between 500 BCE to 500 CE. What makes them so special?
