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Descended from the older Paracas civilisation, the Nazca are of course most famous for their countless mysterious lines drawn in the rocky desert plains in which they lived. They were also great water engineers, creating a series of complex aqueducts.

When you think of the Nazca, you think of their mysterious geometric shapes and lines in the desert, which were seemingly important enough to dedicate such huge amounts of time and resources to create.

From their capital city of Cahuachi, archaeologists have gleamed far more information about this pre-Incan people. This city was of immense, memorising proportions. Most estimates put the terrain it covered at as much as 24km2, that’s, dare I mention it, bigger than Chan Chan, built centuries later. It stretches along the sandy slopes overlooking the fertile valley, in a line that is, by my estimate, about 12km. Here you’ll find dozens of pyramids, broken pottery scattered across the desert and textiles just beneath the surface.

What was found here told us that the Nazca were descendants of the older Paracas culture, continuing their production of some of the most complex and creative textile patterns in the Andean world, and continuing and improving upon their ceramic production techniques, creating new methods to produce colourful and more realistic decoration.

From their ancient burial ground of Chauchilla, we learn that far from being small, the average Nazcan was 1.7m or 5.57ft tall. They also sported long thing dreadlocks that reach the floor.

Other than the fascinating lines, or the huge ceremonial city of Cahuachi, the Nazca are also famous for their complex underground aqueducts, bringing water to the more arid parts of their world. Wells leading down into them are found at Cantalloc, near the much later Inca ruins of Paredones, eventual rulers of this land.

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The Nazcan city of Cahuachi was a stunning and magnificent place. Stretching along the dusty hills above the Nazca River valley are an as-yet unknown number of pyramids and temples - a good number of those rolling hills are not at all natural features. Some estimates of the area the city covered are as much as 24km2 - bigger than even the famous Chimú city of Chan Chan.

Despite its size, no-one but the civilisation’s elite lived here on a permanent basis. Cahuachi was a religious and ceremonial city first, and the administrative centre of the Nasca’s world second. It is thought that huge gatherings took place here, where huge numbers of pilgrims from across the surrounding valley’s came to take part in rituals. Most of the ceramic pottery found here was high quality, beautifully decorated religious pottery - few simple domestic items have been found.

From the ceremonial city it is only a short distance across the valley and across the hills to the main desert plain on which you’ll find the civilisation’s famous geometric patterns, shapes and lines. Could the rituals carried out at Cahuachi and those carried out at the lines be part of the same event, part of the mass gatherings? It is so far unknown.

Grand Pyramid

The first thing that strikes visitors to this archaeological complex, being worked on by Italian Giuseppe Orefici, is the Gran Piramide, perhaps the best restored monument in the city where dozens more remain buried in the sands. Although it too still has a long way to go, it no longer looks like just a mound of sand.

The pyramid, and the other buildings stretching along 17km of the valley, are roughly between 1500 and 2200 years old. As well as pyramids there are ceremonial buildings, workshops, open spaces and places for pilgrims to stay.

At the foot of the Gran Piramide is the Templo del Escalonado, one of the oldest buildings and the most important during the earlier period of the city’s existence. This building was named as such because its walls were decorated with the top half of chakanas(Andean crosses) the look a little like stairs.

We know that music was important to the Nazca - we find images of musicians on many textiles and ceramics, but only from Cahuachi we find out why. It seems, based on archaeological finds of instruments such as flutes and drums at key ceremonial areas, that music was used during religious rituals and ceremonies.

Cahuachi existed for 8 centuries, from 400B.C. to 450A.D. when the city was abandoned. There was no rush in its abandonment though, huge amounts of resources were applied over time to demolish its outer walls and bury the many pyramids beneath the sands. The pyramids ceased to be artificial monuments and returned to nature as towering sandy hills. The city was no longer the capital of the Nasca, and became a holy place, even a burial place.

It is not known what caused the city’s abandonment, and what made the people move on to other newer urban centres, but it is thanks to their attachment to this place, and their care in burying and preserving their city, that one day we might, through our own application of huge amounts of resources, see it in its original form again, uncovered and restored - the biggest of the ancient urban centres of the southern Peruvian coast.

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Nazca pyramid discovered

Updated here.

A new remote sensing technology has peeled away layers of mud and rock near Peru’s Cahuachi desert to reveal an ancient adobe pyramid, Italian researchers announced on Friday at a satellite imagery conference in Rome.

Nicola Masini and Rosa Lasaponara of Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) discovered the pyramid by analysing images from the satellite Quickbird, which they used to penetrate the Peruvian soil.

The researchers investigated a test area along the river Nazca. Covered by plants and grass, it was about a mile away from Cahuachi’s archaeological site, which contains the remains of what is believed to be the world’s biggest mud city.

Via Quickbird, Masini and colleagues collected hi-resolution infra-red and multi spectral images. After the researchers optimized the images with special algorithms, the result was a detailed visualization of a pyramid extending over a 9,000-square-mile area.

The discovery doesn’t come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.

“We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi’s sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view,” Masini told Discovery News. “The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil.”

Cahuachi is the best-known site of the Nazca civilization, which flourished in Peru between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. and slid into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes.

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