Featured Image Credit: Johny Isla
By: Sarah Sharkey
A geoglyph in the Peruvian desert has been confirmed to be a killer whale. The orca was found carved into a hillside in the Nazca Lines, a famous archaeological site that is known for a series of large and old geoglyphs. The Nazca Lines consist of about 1,500 geoglyphs and most of them date back to between 200BC and 600AD.
Johny Isla is an archaeologist and the head of Peru’s Ministry of Culture in Ica. He remembered seeing a picture of the geoglyph from the research done by Germany in the 1960s but had a hard time rediscovering the site. Apparently, the location and description were both wrong which made it extremely difficult to find. After expanding his search area, he finally found in January 2015.
The geoglyph is believed to be around 2,000 years old and perhaps the oldest of the Nasca era. The Peruvian lore indicated that the killer whale was considered a large and powerful semi-mythical creature of the sea. The symbols in the artwork indicate that there could be a religious aspect to this depiction of a killer whale.
The researchers are still trying to determine why a giant sea creature is featured on a desert hillside in Peru, but hopefully, they will uncover that mystery soon.
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