Name: Artificial Intelligence Reveals Ancient Desert Drawings
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Archaeologists are working to unveil Nazca geoglyphs stone by stone, but can AI help scientists identify and recover even more of these hillside geoglyphs?

Can AI help archaeologists uncover more Nazca geoglyphs?

Artificial Intelligence Reveals Ancient Desert Drawings

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Archaeologists are working to unveil Nazca geoglyphs stone by stone, but can AI help scientists identify and recover even more of these hillside geoglyphs?

Can AI help archaeologists uncover more Nazca geoglyphs?

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Artificial Intelligence Reveals Ancient Desert DrawingsPublished November 21, 2022 NARRATOR: Candy Hurtado is an ethnomusicologist from Jauja, in the highlands east of Lima. She’s studying rituals and has come to Nazca to record the water festival.CANDY HURTADO: In the Andean worldview, we understand that time is not linear but that it is cyclical, so that we are always, through ritual, connecting with the past, the present and the future. We’re connected to our ancestors; we are connected to the people that come after us, in a very real way, as well as to the environment. The environment is also considered our ancestors.NARRATOR: Peruvian archaeologists studying the environment to piece together the Nazca story have made surprising discoveries. Using drone images, they’ve identified a different type of geoglyph, not on the flat desert plateaus, but on the hillsides.JOHNY ISLA: (Translated) Now, we need to make the figures more visible and see what the result is.NARRATOR: Johny Isla and his team are restoring his latest discovery, a very faded geoglyph.JOHNY ISLA: (Translated) You go here to tidy up the stones which have fallen. You can just about work out the outline, so it should be quite easy.NARRATOR: Years of erosion have damaged the geoglyph. Johny’s team moves stone after stone, by hand, to re-expose the lighter layer below. It’s a painstaking process.JOHNY ISLA: (Translated) When we realized that on the hillside there were other figures, other geoglyphs, we realized we have to change the way we thought, and looked to the hillside, where we didn’t think there were any drawings.NARRATOR: The team has revealed the outline of a group of people walking, but it needs more work.JOHNY ISLA: (Translated) At 12:00, on the dot, we’ll have a break.NARRATOR: The desert hillsides have long been overlooked. But now there is newfound interest in them.JOHNY ISLA: (Translated) It’s really one of the most striking finds of recent times. It’s the mountain cat, the Pampas cat, an animal in danger of extinction.NARRATOR: Almost 10,000 miles away, in Yamagata, Japan, archaeologist Masato Sakai studies drone footage from the Nazca desert. He’s turned to a high-tech method of searching for geoglyphs: artificial intelligence.MASATO SAKAI (Yamagata University): (Translated) At the beginning, we were looking at the northern Nazca plains, where hummingbirds, monkeys and other famous geoglyphs are concentrated. We let A.I. learn from these famous geoglyphs and other data from this area.NARRATOR: By analyzing aerial images, computer algorithms can spot the cleared surfaces that form the figures. Once the A.I. knows what to look for, it begins scanning the desert for patterns that appear human-made. The software homes in on a very faint shape.MASATO SAKAI: (Translated) We discovered it is a geoglyph of a person holding a club in their hand.

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Artificial Intelligence Reveals Ancient Desert Drawings

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