- [Narrator] Candy Hurtado is an ethnomusicologist
from Jauja, in the Highlands east of Lima.
(dramatic music)
She's studying rituals
and has come to Nazca to record the water festival.
- In the (speaking in foreign language) 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 are 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.
(dramatic music)
(car engines humming)
- [Narrator] Peruvian archeologists 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.
(man speaking in foreign language)
Johny Isla and his team are restoring his latest discovery,
a very faded geoglyph.
(man speaking in foreign language)
Years of erosion have damaged the geoglyph.
Johnny's team moves stone after stone by hand
to re-expose the lighter layer below.
It's a painstaking process.
(man speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter] When we realized that on the hillside
there were other figures, other geoglyphs,
we realized we have to change the way we thought
and look to the hillside
where we didn't think there were any drones.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] The team has revealed the outline
of a group of people walking, but it needs more work.
(man speaking in foreign language)
(dramatic music)
The desert hillsides have long been overlooked
but now there is newfound interest in them.
(dramatic music)
- [Interpreter] 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.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] Almost 10,000 miles away in Yamagata, Japan,
archeologist Masato Sakai studies drone footage
from the Nazca desert.
He's turned to a high tech method
of searching for geoglyphs, artificial intelligence.
(dramatic music)
(man speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter] At the beginning we were looking
at the northern Nazca planes where hummingbirds, monkeys
and other famous geoglyphs are concentrated.
We let AI learn from these famous geoglyphs
and other data from this area.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] By analyzing aerial images,
computer algorithms can spot the cleared surfaces
that form the figures.
Once the AI knows what to look for
it begins scanning the desert
for patterns that appear human made.
(dramatic music)
The software homes in on a very faint shape.
(dramatic music)
(man speaking in foreign language)
- [Interpreter] We discovered it is a geoglyph
of a person holding a club in the right hand.
(dramatic music)