What is the collective name given to the hundreds of ancient ground drawings found in the namesake desert in Peru that range from simple lines to complex animal shapes?
"Nazca Lines The Nazca Lines are a group of very large trenches in the Nazca Desert, in southern Peru. They were created between 500 BCE and 500 CE. These geoglyphs are 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in) deep, and between 0.4 and 1.1 km (.2 and .7 mi) wide. Their combined length is over 1,300 km (808 mi), and cover an area of about 50 sq km (19 sq mi). They were made by scraping off the top layer of reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles to reveal a yellow-grey subsoil. Some of the Nazca lines form shapes that are"
"and lizard like figures depicted in petroglyphs or as gold offering figures frequently includes spirals, for example on the palms of hands. In Lower Central America spirals along with circles, wavy lines, crosses and points are universal petroglyphs characters. Spirals can also be found among the Nazca Lines in the coastal desert of Peru, dating from 200 BC to 500 AD. The geoglyphs number in the thousands and depict animals, plants and geometric motifs, including spirals. Spiral shapes, including the swastika, triskele, etc., have often been interpreted as solar symbols. Roof tiles dating back to the Tang Dynasty with this"
"predetermined shape that typically only becomes visible years after the initial planting or seeding, has been named a arborglyph. Perhaps the most famous geoglyphs are the Nazca lines in Peru. The cultural significance of these geoglyphs for their creators remains unclear, despite many hypotheses. The ""Works of the Old Men"" in Arabia, ""stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older,"" have been described as geoglyphs by Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy. The use of this term to describe these"
"the Nazca Desert. When this gravel is removed, the light-colored clay earth exposed in the bottom of the trench produces lines and contrasts sharply in color and tone with the surrounding land surface. This sublayer contains high amounts of lime which, with the morning mist, hardens to form a protective layer that shields the lines from winds, thereby preventing erosion. The Nazca ""drew"" several hundred simple, but huge, curvilinear animal and human figures by this technique. In total, the earthwork project is huge and complex: the area encompassing the lines is nearly , and the largest figures can span nearly"
"BC to 600 AD. This area is extremely dry. The Nazca developed extensive irrigation systems, including underground canals, that allowed them to farm the land. The Nazca are known for their beautiful textiles and pottery which feature images of animals and mythological beings. They are even more famous, however, for an extraordinary but puzzling set of creations known as the Nazca Lines, which are geoglyphs and geometric line clearings in the Atacama desert, in the district of Nazca. On a large, rock-strewn plain, the Nazca made huge drawings by scraping away stones to reveal the lighter soil underneath. The drawings"
"complexity. Some of the designs are in styles which can be recognized as belonging to the Paracas, Nazca, Tiwanaku, or Inca cultures. Some of the images are of flowers, fish, or living animals of various sorts. Others appear to depict scenes which would be anachronistic in pre-Columbian art, such as knowledge of dinosaurs, advanced medical works and maps. Archaeological remains show evidence of Peruvian cultures going back for several thousand years. At some later stages, the whole of modern Peru was united into a single political and cultural unit, culminating in the Inca Empire, followed by the Spanish conquest. At"
"the Colorado River. The Blythe Intaglios contain three human figures, two four-legged animals, and a spiral; although Harner (1953) reported two spirals. The largest human figure in the Blythe Intaglio group is long. The intaglios are best viewed from the air. Geoglyphs are found throughout the world, the construction methods range from earthen mounds, piles of stone, or the removal of surface plants or soil. The most famous desert intaglios are the Nazca Lines in Peru. The Blythe Geoglyphs or intaglios (anthropomorphic geoglyphs) were created by scraping away layers of darker rocks or pebbles to reveal a stratum of lighter-valued"
"scratched, pecked, carved, or incised on rock surfaces, often on a patina known as desert varnish. Most of the petroglyphs in Petrified Forest National Park are thought to be between 650 and 2,000 years old. From the 16th through the 18th centuries, explorers looking for routes between Spanish colonies along the Rio Grande to the southeast and other Spanish colonies on the Pacific coast to the west passed near or through the area, which they called ""El Desierto Pintado"", the Painted Desert. However, the park's oldest Spanish inscriptions, left by descendants of the region's early Spanish colonists, date only to"
"to those Amerindians of past centuries who must have been their creators. Others believe that there is an Incan component that is now coming to light, and that the glyphs constitute parts of a map. Definitive word on the meaning of Pusharo's glyphs must wait until further research is conducted and completed. The glyphs contain elements such as heart-shaped faces, some with double borders, spirals, zigzags, suns, ""curlicue X's"" and others that defy verbal description. Pusharo The Petroglyphs of Pusharo constitute a unique and extensive ancient rock art site in southeast Peru's Manú National Park, a jungled expanse that still"
"truck driver was arrested, but later released for lack of evidence indicating any intent other than simple error. He had damaged three of the geoglyphs by leaving substantial tire marks across an area of approximately 150 by 350 feet (46 m by 107 m). Nazca Lines The Nazca Lines are a group of very large trenches in the Nazca Desert, in southern Peru. They were created between 500 BCE and 500 CE. These geoglyphs are 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 in) deep, and between 0.4 and 1.1 km (.2 and .7 mi) wide. Their combined length is over"
"depict various plants and animals, including humans, a monkey, birds, and other creatures, as well as lines and geometric shapes. These drawings are so huge, however, that they can be seen only from the sky. Scientists believe that the Nazca made these drawings for their gods. The area of the Nazca lines is called the Pampa Colorada (red plain). A small village near Ica, Cachiche is well known for its history of witches. Doña Julia, Cachiche's first witch, was known to practice ""good magic,"" curing and helping villagers with her spells. Near the entrance to the town, a carving from"
"Geoglyphs of Chug-Chug The geoglyphs of Chug-Chug are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, northeast of María Elena. The area includes 23 archaeological sites, preserving nearly 500 geoglyphs distributed along old caravan routes between the oasis of Calama and Quillagua, the base of an extinct pre-Hispanic town. The oldest of the geoglyphs date back to 1000 BC, while most originated between 900 and 1550 AD, supposedly by the Atacama and Tarapacá tribes that inhabited the surrounding areas. Similar to the Nazca Lines, the geoglyphs of Chug-Chug include human figures, zoomorphic designs of animals"
"Peruvian desert, with its elaborate complex of temples, an amphitheatre and ordinary houses. The urban complex is spread out over and contains plazas and residential buildings. Caral was a thriving metropolis at roughly the same time that Egypt's great pyramids were being built. Caral is the largest recorded site in the Andean region with dates older than 2000 BCE and appears to be the model for the urban design adopted by Andean civilisations that rose and fell over the span of four millennia. It is believed that Caral may answer questions about the origins of the Andean civilisations and the"
"Amotape complex The Amotape complex is an archaeological culture on the northern coast of Peru dated to between c. 9,000 and 7,100 BCE. It constitutes some of the oldest evidence for human occupation of the Peruvian coast. The Amotape complex was identified by the American anthropologist James Richardson III, who located a dozen small camps in the Peruvian coastal desert at the foot of the Amotape hills, near the modern city of Talara. The people of the Amotope complex were hunter–gatherers who manufactured unifacial stone tools in chalcedony and quartzite to exploit a variety of local plants and animals. They"
"people of ancient Peru worshiped nature; they placed emphasis on animals and often depicted spiders in their art. The people of the Nazca culture created expansive geoglyphs, including a large depiction of a spider on the Nazca plain in southern Peru. The purpose or meaning of the so-called ""Nazca lines"" is still uncertain. An adobe spider-god temple of the Cupisnique culture was discovered in the Lambayeque Region of Peru. It is part of the Ventarron temple complex and is known as Collud. The Cupisnique spider deity was associated with hunting nets, textiles, war, and power. One image depicts spider deities"
"Black Mountain Rock Art District The Black Mountain Rock Art District is an archaeological district located in the Mojave Desert northwest of Barstow, San Bernardino County, California. The district includes a large collection of Native American rock art, including over 12,000 petroglyphs. The largest group of petroglyphs, which includes over 1,000 of the designs, is in Inscription Canyon. The more complex designs include humanoid figures, shields, masks, baskets, deer, bighorn sheep, and other plants and animals. Other petroglyphs represent patterns such as circles, lines, and zigzags. Native Americans made petroglyps in the area due to its abundance of easily marked"
"the Sajama Lines are the largest archaeological site in the Andes and might be considered the largest artwork in the world. The lines were created by scraping aside vegetation and the dark surface material consisting of soil and oxidized rock and exposing the lighter subsurface material. Like the better-known Nazca Lines (which differ from the Sajama Lines in that some of the Nazca are depictions of animals) neither the purpose of these lines, nor how the makers achieved such precision, are completely understood. Scholars at the University of Pennsylvania describe: While many of these sacred lines extend as far as"
"crop to build nets and lines for catching fish and other marine resources. It also doubled as a resource manufactured into textiles to make clothing. El Paraíso, Peru El Paraíso (IPA: , ""ell pah-rah-EE-so"") is the modern name of a Late Preceramic (3500-1800 BC) archaeological site located in the Chillón Valley on the central coast of Peru. The site is situated several kilometers north of Lima, the capital of Peru, in the San Martin de Porres District in the Province of Lima. El Paraíso is one of the largest settlements from this period, encompassing over 58 hectares of land. Other"
"stone lines near Caral. This image, known as a geoglyph, is located on the desert floor just west of the main site at Caral. When traced out, the lines form the design of a human face with long, streaming hair and a gaping mouth. This geoglyph is similar to the screaming, bleeding figures found etched onto the stone walls at a site called Cerro Sechín, in the Casma Valley to the north. It is unclear what exactly this figure means, but it is believed to have been constructed around the same time as Caral and to have been associated with"
"Painted Desert (Arizona) The Painted Desert is a United States desert of badlands in the Four Corners area running from near the east end of Grand Canyon National Park and southeast into Petrified Forest National Park. It is most easily accessed in the north portion of Petrified Forest National Park. The Painted Desert is known for its brilliant and varied colors, that not only include the more common red rock, but even shades of lavender. The Painted Desert was named by an expedition under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado on his 1540 quest to find the Seven Cities of Cibola, which"
"digital registry of these ancient manifestations, distributed in 33 hectares. This work has provided knowledge of the fact that La Pintada was an important space for diverse human groups, as much for hunting-collector groups that inhabited it during the 12th and 13th centuries, as well as for native seris, yaquis and pimas that probably used it as a ritual center between the 17th and 18th centuries. The rock represented images; made 1,200 years ago, represent local fauna such as deer, reptiles and birds, depicted by the first hunting-collector groups, when shaping them in stone, possibly as part of ancient rituals."
"on the plains surrounding the various lakes and rivers. The diet was greatly expanded when early agriculture was introduced, possibly influenced by migrations from the south; present-day Peru. The main cultivated product was maize in various forms and colours, while tubers formed a significant other part of the food source. The fertile soils of especially the Bogotá savanna proved advantageous for the development of this agriculture, still evidenced today by the widespread farmfields outside the Colombian capital. The first forms of art recognised on the Altiplano are petrographs and petroglyphs in various locations on the Altiplano, mainly at the rock"
"region on Peru’s north central Pacific coast approximately 100 miles north of the modern city of Lima. It contains four river valleys: Fortaleza, Pativilca, Supe, and Huaura. Archaeological surveys have uncovered 30 Late Archaic sites, ranging from 10 to 200 hectares in area. These sites are characterized by large, pyramid-like structures, sunken ceremonial plazas, and other assorted temples and housing. For the past 40 years, the reasons as to why all of these South American ancient civilizations emerged in Peru in the Late Archaic period have been a topic of debate. Many believed that the nearby marine resources were the"
"rhinoceroses which aren't found in that region of India. Iran Petroglyphs During recent years a large number of rock carvings has been identified in different parts of Iran. The vast majority depict the ibex. Rock drawings were found in December 2016 near Khomeyn, Iran, which may be the oldest drawings discovered, with one cluster possibly 40,000 years old. Accurate estimations were unavailable due to US sanctions. Petroglyphs are the most ancient works of art left by humankind that secretly provide an opening to the past eras of life and help us to discover different aspects of prehistoric lives. Tools to"
"Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons Big and Little Petroglyph Canyons are two principal landforms within which are found major accumulations of Paleo-Indian and/or Native American Petroglyphs, or rock art, by the Coso People located in the Coso Range Mountains of the northern Mojave Desert, and now within the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, near the towns of China Lake and Ridgecrest, California. Little Petroglyph Canyon contains 20,000 documented images, which surpasses in number for most other collections. Additionally, the archeological resources are remarkably undisturbed. The Coso Petroglyphs have been subject to various interpretations as to their meaning and function."
"in determining when the rainy season would come in the barren Atacama. The Atacama Giant is one out of nearly 5,000 geoglyphs - ancient artwork that is drawn into the landscape - that have been discovered in the Atacama in the last three decades. Although geoglyphs have always been the subject of wild conjectures and bizarre theories, it is now widely believed that they are the work of several successive cultures that dwelt in this region of South America, including the Tiwanaku and Inca. In 2014, the Dakar rally was criticized for damage done to archaeological sites in Chile. Atacama"
"Agricultural history of Peru Much of the pre-history of Peru has been wrapped up in where the farmable land was located. The most populated coastal regions of Peru are the two parallel mountain ranges and the series of 20 to 30 rivers running through the coastal desert. In dry periods only the mountains are wet enough for agriculture and the desert coast is empty, while in wet periods many cultures have thrived along the rivers of the coast. The well known Inca were a mountain-based culture that expanded when the climate became more wet, often sending conquered peoples down from"
"soil. The displaced rocks outlined the figures and the exposed soil was stamped down which makes it more difficult for plants to grow in the lines. The intaglios are located on flat terraces in the Colorado River floodplain. While these ""gravel pictographs"" are found through the deserts of southeastern California, human figures are found only near the Colorado River. Other intaglios depict mountain lions, birds, snakes, and unidentified zoomorphic and geometric shapes. The figures are so immense that many of them were not observed by non-Indians until the 1930s. The set of Blythe Intaglios and nearby geoglyphs include several dozen"
"are petroglyphs in the base and the top of the plateau. There is no similarity between the paintings and the rock motifs, could very well belong to completely separate traditions and in general we would talk about the petroglyphs being older, but in this case, the paintings show specific similarities with cave paintings located in the Rio Grande, right at the Pecos River mouth. The Pecos style is dated with some precision and goes back about four thousand years, approximate age of the paintings. The style is widely distributed in the region, in an area extending about 60 kilometers to"
"the Sahara was a habitable savanna rather than the current desert. Although sources vary considerably, the earliest pieces of art are assumed to be 12,000 years old. The vast majority date to the 9th and 10th millennia BP or younger, according to OSL dating of associated sediments. Among the 15,000 engravings so far identified depicted are large wild animals including antelopes and crocodiles, cattle herds and humans that engage in activities such as hunting and dancing. According to UNESCO, ""The exceptional density of paintings and engravings...have made ""Tassili"" world famous."" Tassili n'Ajjer is a vast plateau in south-east Algeria at"
"type of drawing could well represent a proximity of the moon with Venus or Jupiter. Another, better known document was updated during the 1970s at the Chaco Canyon site (New Mexico), occupied around 1000 AD by the Ancestral Pueblo Peoples. On the flat underside of an overhang, it represents a hand, below which there is a crescent moon facing a star at the bottom-left. On the wall underneath the petroglyph there is a drawing which could be the core and tail of a comet. Apart from the petroglyph, which could represent the configuration of the moon and supernova on the"
"Cueva Ahumada Cueva Ahumada is an archaeological site located within several canyons in the La Rinconada village, García Municipality, in the Nuevo León state, México. Cave painting in northeastern Mexico covers two types of artwork: rock engraving, also called petroglyphs (Pictogram or pictographs). A third type of rock art, geoglyphs so far has not been detected in this region. Cave painting art is found in all human occupied continents, it is a world heritage, as proclaimed by UNESCO. Its antiquity goes back to the dawn of human prehistory. In France and Spain, the most ancient cave paintings date back to"
"of Yucca brevifolia (Yucca palm), which is endemic to the desert. Unlike the Sonoran Desert, the Mojave Desert has few trees, both in number and diversity. The Painted Desert is a broad area of badlands located on the Colorado Plateau in Northern Arizona. It covers at least , and stretches from north of Cameron, near the Grand Canyon, ending just beyond the Petrified Forest. The Painted Desert derives its name from the multitude of colored sediments and bentonite clay seen from its Chinle rock formation, left exposed by erosion. In the southern portion of the desert, the remains of a"