Nazca Civilization

About Nazca Civilization

Farmers on a desert pampa between the Ingenio and Nazca rivers, working sometime around 100 BCE, began clearing a line — lifting iron-darkened pebbles, exposing the lighter caliche underneath, piling the displaced stones along the edge. The result, when seen from the surrounding hills, was a luminous track running for hundreds of meters across what is otherwise the driest stretch of South America. Over the next eight hundred years, descendants of those first line-makers would clear more than a thousand straight lines, geometric trapezoids and spirals, and at least three hundred figurative images of monkeys, hummingbirds, killer whales, spiders, and humanoid beings on the same plateau. Archaeologists call the people who made them Nasca, after the southern Peruvian river valley where their settlements concentrate. The Nazca emerged in the Early Intermediate Period out of the older Paracas culture of the Ica Valley, inheriting Paracas weaving and burial conventions while developing a wholly new ceramic vocabulary: thin-walled, polychrome bowls, jars, and bridge-spout bottles painted with at least fifteen mineral and organic slips before firing. The civilization never coalesced into a unified state. Scholars have found no evidence of a Nazca emperor, no walled imperial capital, and no standing army. The Nazca system was, instead, a sophisticated network of valley-dwelling agriculturalists tied together by shared ceramics, shared iconography, shared engineering, and a single dominant ritual center where they convened. Settlement surveys by the German Archaeological Institute under Markus Reindel and Johnny Isla, ongoing since 1997, document a network of small-to-medium communities along the perpetually water-stressed valleys of the Rio Grande drainage, oriented around a single monumental pilgrimage center at Cahuachi on the south bank of the Nazca River. From Cahuachi the Nazca ritual world radiated outward across the pampa: the lines, the cemeteries at Chauchilla and elsewhere, the shrines at Pueblo Viejo and Pampa Blanca, and the puquio aqueducts that still water the Nazca Valley today. The chronological framework, established by Lawrence Dawson and refined by Donald Proulx, divides the cultural sequence into nine ceramic phases (Nasca 1 through Nasca 9) that move from the early monumental style of the first centuries CE through the proliferous style of Phase 6-7, when iconographic complexity peaks before collapsing into the late Loro style (formerly designated Nasca 8) associated with Wari intrusion. By 750 CE the system was disintegrating under prolonged drought and pressure from the highland Wari, and the geoglyph tradition had largely ceased.

Achievements

Twenty-nine to thirty-six puquios — horizontal galleries that descend from a hillside spring-line down to a surface trench, with periodic open ojos for cleaning and ventilation — are the most consequential surviving piece of Nazca infrastructure. The count varies depending on whether tributary branches are counted separately, and the galleries run along the Nazca, Taruga, and Las Trancas valleys. The archaeologists Katharina Schreiber (UC Santa Barbara) and Josué Lancho Rojas mapped the system in detail in the 1990s and synthesized their findings in Irrigation and Society in the Peruvian Desert: The Puquios of Nasca (2003); satellite radar work by Rosa Lasaponara and Nicola Masini at Italy's CNR (published 2016) confirmed that the puquios were not isolated but tied into a regional hydraulic network engineered to deliver water to settlements where surface streams ran dry for most of the year. Most function today exactly as they did in the Middle to Late Nasca period, when the system is thought to have been built (Schreiber and Lancho place initial construction around Nasca 5 times, roughly AD 400-500). The geoglyphs themselves are the second great Nazca achievement. Made by the simple removal of a thin layer of dark, manganese- and iron-oxide-coated pebbles to expose the pale clay below, individual figurative drawings range from the 50-meter Hummingbird to the 285-meter Pelican, with straight lines extending in some cases for more than ten kilometers across the pampa with deviations of less than 1 meter. The astronomer Anthony Aveni's 1990 collaborative volume The Lines of Nazca compiled the field surveys that established no unified astronomical alignment, undercutting Maria Reiche's longstanding solar-calendar hypothesis and shifting interpretation toward water and pilgrimage. Cahuachi, the third achievement, is monumental in its own register: the Great Pyramid stands roughly 28 meters tall in seven stepped tiers, built of conical adobe bricks (adobones) made by hand-shaping wet clay around bundles of cane. The Italian Archaeological Mission has excavated multiple ritual closures of mounds, in which entire structures were intentionally buried under sterile sand and decommissioned, sometimes after only a few decades of use. Nazca textiles continue the technical mastery inherited from Paracas: the Brooklyn Museum and the Museo Larco hold mantles and tunics with weft counts exceeding 200 threads per inch and embroidered figural compositions of warriors, supernatural beings, and trophy heads. Polychrome ceramics, fired in low-oxygen pit kilns, achieved color stability across red, white, black, gray, brown, pink, violet, orange, and yellow slips on a single vessel, a chromatic range unmatched anywhere else in the pre-Hispanic Andes. The thinness of the vessel walls (often under 5 millimeters) and the burnishing of the slip surface combine to give Nasca polychrome a hard, almost lacquered finish that distinguishes it visually and tactilely from any other Andean ceramic tradition. The agricultural achievement runs alongside the puquio system: in addition to the underground galleries, the Nazca built surface canal networks tied into seasonal river flow, terraced the lower foothills for cotton and chili production, and used the deep-rooted huarango (Prosopis pallida) tree as both a nitrogen-fixer and a windbreak across cultivated land. Architecturally, beyond Cahuachi, smaller Nazca-period sites including La Tiza, Tunga, and the Estaquería (a curious arrangement of standing wooden posts at Cahuachi whose function remains debated) demonstrate the cultural reach of Nasca ritual architecture across the Rio Grande drainage.

Technology

Nasca polychrome ceramics rest on a single technical foundation: pit-firing in a closely controlled, low-oxygen reducing atmosphere. Potters mixed mineral pigments such as hematite (red), magnetite (black), kaolin (white), and various earth ochres with a clay slip, applied them to leather-hard vessels with reed brushes, polished the surface with a smooth stone, and fired the pots at temperatures estimated by thermoluminescence and refiring experiments at around 750-900 degrees Celsius. The result is a fused, glassy-feeling slip that has held its color across two thousand years of desert burial. Pre-fire slip painting (rather than the more common post-fire pigment application of contemporaries like the Lima culture) is the technical signature that distinguishes Nazca polychrome and explains its preservation. The puquio system represents the other technological summit. Each gallery is a horizontal mining tunnel, roofed in the Nazca period with huarango (Prosopis pallida) logs and stone slabs, that taps a paleochannel or shallow aquifer along the alluvial fan of an Andean tributary. The construction technique required reading the subsurface hydrology accurately enough to drive a tunnel hundreds of meters from a downstream surface trench up to an underground water table at exactly the right gradient for gravity flow without cave-in. The shafts (ojos), spaced roughly every 25 to 50 meters along a gallery, are typically 1 to 2 meters in diameter and lined with stone in a distinctive corkscrew spiral pattern that allows a worker to descend on foot for cleaning. Spanish chronicles from the sixteenth century describe local communities maintaining the systems through annual cleaning festivals, a practice that continues. Textile technology built on the Paracas inheritance: backstrap loom weaving with cotton and camelid fibers, supplementary weft and tapestry techniques, and a needle-knotted cross-knit looping used for the elaborate borders of figural mantles. The Brooklyn Museum's Nasca mantle in red, with iridescent figural embroidery, dates to roughly 100 BCE-300 CE and exemplifies the technique. Dye chemistry included cochineal red from the parasitic insect on Opuntia cactus, indigo from Indigofera, and yellow from chilca (Baccharis), with mordants of urine and aluminum salts; analyses by Ann Pollard Rowe at the Textile Museum in Washington identified the full Nazca dye palette across surviving textile collections. Subsistence technology was specialized for an arid floodplain environment: the Nazca grew maize, beans, squash, peanuts, manioc, sweet potato, chili, and cotton, supplemented by ocean fish and shellfish brought inland from the coast, with isotopic studies by Christina Conlee and Kelly Knudson confirming a maize-heavy diet with significant marine protein contribution. The panpipe (antara) of the Nazca, fashioned from kiln-fired ceramic rather than the more common reed, achieved a tuning consistency unique to the culture; ethnomusicologist Anna Gruszczynska-Ziolkowska's measurements of cached antaras from Cahuachi documented microtonal scales that vary systematically across pipe sets, suggesting either ensemble playing or ritual sequencing. Long-distance exchange networks brought Spondylus princeps shell from the Ecuadorian coast and obsidian from the Andean highlands (sourced primarily from the Quispisisa and Jampatilla flows in Ayacucho, identified by trace-element studies), both heavily concentrated in Cahuachi ceremonial deposits.

Religion

Donald Proulx, the late University of Massachusetts iconographer, spent his career cataloguing the category of objects at the heart of Nazca religion: the trophy head. More than 150 actual prepared heads have been excavated from Nazca contexts, with a small hole drilled in the frontal bone and a carrying cord threaded through. The mouth is often pinned shut with huarango (Prosopis) spines or wooden plugs, the lips sometimes sewn with cotton. In the polychrome iconography, trophy heads are the single most frequent motif, held by warriors, hung from the belts of supernatural composites, sprouting plants from the severed neck, or grasped by anthropomorphic killer whales and falcons. The traditional reading was that the heads were taken from defeated enemies. A 2009 strontium isotope study by Kelly Knudson, Sloan Williams, and colleagues, published in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, tested 16 trophy heads against Nazca regional baselines and found that the strontium signatures were locally consistent: the heads were not from foreigners but from members of the same population. The finding pushed interpretation toward fertility ritual and ancestor veneration rather than warfare, with the heads functioning as agricultural and rain-bringing offerings; the iconography of plants growing from severed necks reads, in this light, as a literal claim about the ritual productivity of the head. The principal supernatural figures painted on Nazca pottery include the Anthropomorphic Mythical Being, often shown with a feline mouth-mask, streaming hair appendages terminating in human heads, and a serpentine body; the Killer Whale Being with a hooked weapon and trophy head; the Spotted Cat with falcon attributes; and the Horrible Bird, a vulture-like predator. Proulx's iconographic scheme tracks these figures across the Nazca ceramic phases (Phase 2 through Phase 7) and shows progressive abstraction toward what scholars call the Late Nasca proliferous style. Cahuachi was the central ritual stage. Excavations by Orefici's team uncovered ceremonial deposits containing intact panpipes (antaras), some with as many as fourteen reed tubes tuned in microtonal scales studied by ethnomusicologist Anna Gruszczynska-Ziolkowska; cached drums; ceramic offerings broken in patterned smashes; and burials of decapitated individuals associated with mound closures. The pampa lines themselves are increasingly read as ritual paths, walked rather than viewed. Anthony Aveni and Helaine Silverman both argued in the 1990s that the lines functioned as processional ways connected to water rituals, and the 2024 PNAS study by Masato Sakai and IBM Research (described in the modern discoveries section) found that the new figurative geoglyphs cluster along these paths and frequently depict humans, livestock, and ritual scenes, supporting the procession-and-narrative reading.

Mysteries

What the lines were for remains the largest open question in Andean archaeology. Maria Reiche, the German mathematician who lived alongside the geoglyphs from 1946 until her death in 1998 and personally swept the lines clean for half a century, argued the lines were a giant astronomical calendar tracking solstices, equinoxes, and lunar standstills. Anthony Aveni's collaborative testing in the 1980s found that astronomical alignments occurred no more often than would be expected by chance, far below what a coordinated calendar system would require, undercutting Maria Reiche's longstanding solar-calendar hypothesis. Subsequent interpretations have ranged across water-divination paths (Johan Reinhard, 1985), ceque-style ritual radial systems extending from Cahuachi (Aveni and Silverman, 1991), processional pilgrimage tracks tied to fertility (David Browne and others), and cosmological maps of underground water flow (Johan Reinhard's later work). The 2024 PNAS paper by Masato Sakai and the IBM team weighs in: it shows that the smaller, hillside-located figurative geoglyphs cluster along human paths and depict subjects from individual daily life, while the large pampa figures sit on community-scale ritual routes and depict supernatural beings. The split suggests at least two functionally distinct subcategories within the geoglyph corpus, but no single interpretation accounts for the full range. The trophy head debate, while substantially advanced by the Knudson strontium study, has not closed. Whether the local-population heads represent ritual decapitation of community members chosen for sacrificial roles, ancestor veneration in which heads were curated rather than taken in violence, or both, remains unresolved. The 2023 episode involving the so-called Nazca tridactyl mummies presented to the Mexican Congress by journalist Jaime Maussan generated public attention but does not represent a genuine archaeological mystery: forensic analyses by the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences of Peru's Public Ministry, and by physical anthropologists including Guido Lombardi and Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, have shown the specimens to be assemblages of human (and in some cases animal) bones glued together with modern synthetic adhesive, a finding the Peruvian Ministry of Culture has condemned. The genuine open scholarly mystery is the relationship between Nasca and the late Paracas Necropolis tradition, which immediately preceded it: whether the transition was demographic continuity with stylistic shift or migration of new populations into the south coast remains debated. A 2014 ancient-DNA study by Lars Fehren-Schmitz and colleagues at Nasca and Paracas cemeteries found genetic continuity, supporting the demographic-continuity view, but the cultural shift remains striking and underexplained. Finally, the question of why a society that drew tens of thousands of lines across the pampa apparently never developed monumental urban architecture beyond Cahuachi, and never coalesced into a centralized state, sets Nazca apart from contemporaries like Moche and asks for an explanation that current settlement archaeology has not provided.

Artifacts

Brooklyn Museum holdings include a Nasca polychrome bridge-spout bottle painted with two killer whale beings clutching trophy heads, registered as a Phase 4 (c. 200-450 CE) example and frequently reproduced in surveys of Nasca art. The Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera in Lima holds the largest Nasca ceramic collection in the world, including a head jar in the form of a severed human head with cactus-thorn pinned eyes, and a celebrated Phase 5 vessel showing a procession of warriors carrying staves and trophy heads. The Metropolitan Museum's holdings include several Nasca head jars from the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection with the diagnostic forehead carrying-hole; one good public-collection example is accession 1978.412.61 (Met online catalog #310517). The Art Institute of Chicago's container depicting warriors, rulers, and winged beings with trophy heads is a key Phase 5-6 polychrome bowl that has anchored iconographic discussion of the supernatural composite figures. The largest single concentration of Nazca textiles outside Peru is divided between the Field Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Textile Museum in Washington, and the Gothenburg World Culture Museum, all holding embroidered burial mantles excavated from Paracas Necropolis and Nazca tomb contexts in the 1920s and 1930s. The geoglyph corpus on the Pampas of Jumana itself functions as the largest open-air Nasca artifact: by 2024 the figurative inventory stood at over 730 confirmed images after the AI-assisted survey, plus thousands of geometric and linear figures. The Hummingbird (93 meters), the Spider (47 meters), the Monkey (93 meters), the Astronaut (32 meters, located on a hillside slope rather than the pampa), the Tree, the Hands, and the Whale are the most-photographed individual figures. At Cahuachi, the principal excavated structures include the Great Pyramid (Templo Mayor), the Templo del Escalonado, the Templo de las Estacas (Temple of the Stakes, named for the wooden post arrangement found in situ), and the Sala de los Antaras, where Orefici's team found a cached deposit of more than thirty tuned panpipes wrapped in textile bundles. The Museo Maria Reiche Neuman in Nazca and the Museo Antonini, run by the Italian mission, hold the regional artifact archive. Chauchilla cemetery, 30 kilometers south of Nazca city, contains roughly a dozen looted-and-restored above-ground tomb chambers exposing seated, textile-wrapped mummies whose remarkable preservation comes from a combination of hyperarid burial and resin treatment of the wrappings; the cemetery functioned from approximately 200 to 900 CE and is now a protected national heritage site managed in partnership with local communities. The trophy-head archaeological corpus consists of more than 150 prepared heads recovered from sites including Cahuachi, Chaviña, and the Las Trancas valley; the Field Museum, Yale's Peabody Museum, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley, and the Museo Regional de Ica all hold significant trophy-head series. Late Paracas-style mummy bundles from Cerro Colorado on the Bahia de Paracas, excavated by Julio C. Tello between 1925 and 1930 and now distributed across Peruvian and international collections, document the textile and burial traditions that the Nasca inherited and continued.

Decline

By the early 500s CE, the Nazca were already living through the first of two prolonged dry intervals that paleoclimatic reconstructions from Quelccaya ice core data and lake sediments place at roughly 540-560 CE and again 570-610 CE. The drought struck a population that had spent five centuries clearing huarango woodland to expand maize and cotton fields. A 2009 study by David Beresford-Jones, Alex Chepstow-Lusty, and colleagues at Cambridge, published in Latin American Antiquity, used pollen cores from the Ica Valley to argue that the Nazca had stripped the deep-rooted Prosopis pallida cover from key sectors of the floodplain. The huarango stabilized soils, fixed nitrogen, and broke wind across the pampa, and its loss left the desert vulnerable to flash flooding when the rains returned. The Beresford-Jones team's argument is that the Nazca engineered an ecological tipping point through their own land clearance, then suffered the consequence when shifting climate compounded the deforestation. The pilgrimage system showed it first. Ritual deposits at Cahuachi from the late Phase 5 period (around 450-550 CE) include unusually large and concentrated burials of decapitated individuals interpreted as crisis-period offerings, after which the major mounds were systematically buried and abandoned. The Italian mission has documented the formal closing of the Great Pyramid and several smaller mounds during this interval. Settlements in the Nazca Valley contracted; by 600 CE the population had shifted upstream into the foothills closer to perennial water. Into this weakened landscape pressed the Wari, the highland imperial culture centered near modern Ayacucho. Wari military and administrative outposts began appearing on the south coast around 600-650 CE, with the most important being Pacheco in the Nazca Valley itself, a Wari-style D-shaped temple complex excavated by Julio C. Tello in the 1920s and re-examined by Patricia Knobloch in the 2000s. Katharina Schreiber's broader synthesis of the Wari intrusion (e.g., Wari Imperialism in Middle Horizon Peru, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 1992) remains the standard archaeological framing of how Wari administrative patterns appeared on the south coast. Wari pottery styles begin appearing alongside late Nasca ceramics in stratified contexts, and by 700 CE Nasca polychrome production had been largely replaced by Loro and proto-Wari hybrid styles. The transformation was not a single conquest event but a gradual absorption: by the start of the Middle Horizon (around 750 CE), the autonomous Nazca cultural system was gone, succeeded by a Wari-affiliated regional culture that retained some south-coast iconographic elements but no longer drew geoglyphs and no longer maintained Cahuachi as a ceremonial center. The puquios, however, kept running, and the populations of the Nazca and Ica valleys persisted continuously through Wari, Ica-Chincha, Inca, and Spanish colonial periods.

Modern Discoveries

Masato Sakai (Yamagata University) and a team at IBM Research Tokyo published the single biggest twenty-first-century Nazca development in PNAS in September 2024: "AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose." Between September 2022 and February 2023, the team trained a deep-learning model on existing geoglyph imagery and ran it across high-resolution aerial photography of the Nazca pampa. The model flagged 47,410 candidate patches; human specialists narrowed these to 1,309 priority targets; drone photography and ground survey at the priority sites confirmed 303 new figurative geoglyphs, nearly doubling the prior known total of 318. The new figures are predominantly small (under 10 meters), located on hillsides and along paths, and depict humans, livestock, and ritual scenes more often than the mythological beings of the famous large pampa drawings. The team also reported that 968 candidate targets remained unsurveyed at publication, with at least 248 additional figures predicted. A 2025 follow-up reported in The Art Newspaper documented continued discoveries from those pending candidates. Yamagata University has run a long-term Nazca research program under Sakai since 2004; earlier discoveries from the same project include 143 new figurative geoglyphs announced in November 2019, of which one was the first geoglyph at the site identified by an AI model in collaboration with IBM Japan. The German Archaeological Institute mission in Palpa, directed by Markus Reindel and Johnny Isla since 1997, continues to publish on the older Paracas geoglyphs that preceded Nasca on hillsides at Palpa, demonstrating that the geoglyph tradition began at least four centuries earlier than the classic Nasca pampa figures. Italian remote-sensing work by Rosa Lasaponara and Nicola Masini (CNR-ISPC) has used multispectral satellite imagery and ground-penetrating radar at Cahuachi to map buried structures and document the puquio network. Recent isotope and ancient-DNA work has continued to fill in the picture: a 2020 PNAS paper by Lars Fehren-Schmitz and colleagues integrated ancient DNA with archaeological, historical, and biogeochemical data from the Chincha Valley to reconstruct south-coast population dynamics through the Late Horizon, and the broader 2020 Andean paleogenomic synthesis by Nakatsuka et al. (Cell) found evidence of substantial population stability across the Paracas-Nasca transition followed by sharper genetic shifts during the Wari intrusion. The 2023 forensic examinations of the Maussan tridactyl mummy claims, conducted by Peruvian Public Ministry forensic specialists and physical anthropologists, established that the specimens are composite assemblages of human and animal bone bound with modern synthetic adhesive rather than intact ancient remains, closing the case in scientific terms even as the public controversy continues.

Significance

Cahuachi reframed how archaeologists think about pre-state Andean centers. From 1983 onward, Helaine Silverman of the University of Illinois excavated a complex of more than forty adobe mounds spread across roughly 1.5 square kilometers and found almost no domestic refuse, no kitchen middens, no permanent population. Her 1993 monograph Cahuachi in the Ancient Nasca World argued the site functioned as a non-urban ceremonial center, occupied seasonally by pilgrims who came to bury their dead, deposit offerings, and participate in feasts whose remains include thousands of broken polychrome vessels, panpipes, and Spondylus shell fragments imported from Ecuador. The Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Orefici, who excavated continuously at Cahuachi from 1982 until his death in June 2025, expanded the picture to roughly forty mounds and identified named structures including the Great Pyramid, the Temple of the Staircase, and the Orange Pyramid. His final reports, issued through the Centro Italiano Studi e Ricerche Archeologiche Precolombiane and the Italian Foreign Ministry, established that Cahuachi was deliberately decommissioned in stages: structures were buried under sterile sand at the close of their use, a ritual practice that has parallels in highland Andean traditions but no exact precedent on the south coast. The Nazca matter to historians of religion as the clearest pre-Inca example of a society organized around pilgrimage rather than urban kingship. They matter to art historians for the polychrome ceramic record, one of the densest visual languages in the Americas: warriors, mythical decapitator figures, killer whales, supernatural composites of falcon and feline that art historian Donald Proulx catalogued in his 2006 study A Sourcebook of Nasca Ceramic Iconography. They matter to historians of agriculture for the puquios, a system of horizontal underground galleries built to tap groundwater along the alluvial fans of the Nazca and Taruga rivers, still maintained and used today by farmers in the Nazca and Palpa districts. They matter to historians of mass communication as the only ancient society that built durable images at landscape scale, designed to be read at a register that human eyes on the ground could not fully see. The Nazca geoglyph problem (who these were for, how they were viewed, and why a society without monumental urban architecture invested so heavily in landscape art) has become a central case study in the archaeology of religion. And they matter as an ancestral population, alongside subsequent Wari, Ica-Chincha, Inca, and Spanish colonial populations, of the modern mestizo communities of the Ica and Nazca regions, where the puquios remain in use, the cemetery at Chauchilla is a national heritage site, and local communities trace continuity to the people who first drew the lines. The annual community cleaning of the Nasca puquios — at Aja, Cantalloc, and other galleries — has been recognized as a living cultural-heritage practice by Peru's Ministerio de Cultura and remains one of the most explicit pieces of living continuity between a pre-Hispanic engineering system and its contemporary descendants anywhere in the Americas.

Connections

Late Paracas culture of the Ica Valley supplied the cultural ground from which the Nazca emerged around 100 BCE — Julio C. Tello's 1925 excavations at the Paracas Necropolis on Cerro Colorado recovered hundreds of seated mummy bundles wrapped in some of the finest figural textiles ever made, and Nasca textile techniques, mummification practices, and several iconographic figures (including the Oculate Being that becomes the Anthropomorphic Mythical Being of Nasca pottery) descend directly from Paracas. Paracas dates roughly 800 BCE-100 CE. The 2014 Fehren-Schmitz ancient-DNA work confirmed genetic continuity between the populations. Contemporaries to the north included the Moche of the north coast and the Lima culture of the central coast; Nasca polychrome bottles have been recovered in small numbers from Moche and Lima contexts and vice versa, indicating long-distance ceramic exchange. To the east, the Topara polity in the Pisco-Cañete area maintained closer ties through the Ica Valley. The Wari highland empire absorbed Nasca by 700 CE, and Wari iconography then carried forward several Nasca elements (notably the staff-bearing front-faced deity from Tiahuanaco, processed through Wari, with mythical-being attributes that echo Nasca composites) into the Middle Horizon imperial style that spread through the central Andes. After the Wari collapse around 1000 CE, the Ica region developed the distinctive Ica-Chincha culture, which the Inca encountered and absorbed in the 1470s. The Inca administered the Ica-Chincha and lower-south-coast valleys as part of the Chinchaysuyu quarter of Tahuantinsuyu (the Chincha kingdom gave the quarter its name), and Inca colonists settled at sites like Tambo Colorado, where Inca trapezoidal architecture sits next to coastal Andean walls. The Inca period ended with the Spanish conquest in 1532. The descendant communities are the Quechua- and Spanish-speaking populations of the modern departments of Ica and Lima provinces in southern Peru. Farmers in the districts of Nazca, Vista Alegre, San Carlos, and Aja still draw water through more than two dozen functioning Nasca-built puquios, and the annual cleaning of the puquio at Aja involves a community cleaning ritual recognized as living cultural heritage by Peru's Ministerio de Cultura. The town of Nazca holds the modern Maria Reiche Museum and the regional administrative office of the Ministerio de Cultura, which manages the geoglyph zone. Chauchilla cemetery is operated as an open-air heritage site by local communities. In recent decades, indigenous communities of the Ica Valley have engaged with archaeological projects through formal consultations, and genetic studies (notably the 2014 and 2020 Fehren-Schmitz papers) document substantial genetic continuity through the pre-Hispanic period; modern coastal Peruvian populations carry genetic ancestry from Nasca-period and earlier south-coast peoples alongside post-Conquest admixture.

Further Reading

• Helaine Silverman, Cahuachi in the Ancient Nasca World (1993)
• Donald Proulx, A Sourcebook of Nasca Ceramic Iconography (2006)
• Anthony F. Aveni (ed.), The Lines of Nazca (1990)
• Helaine Silverman and Donald Proulx, The Nasca (Blackwell, 2002)
• Katharina Schreiber and Josué Lancho Rojas, Irrigation and Society in the Peruvian Desert: The Puquios of Nasca (Lexington, 2003)
• David G. Beresford-Jones et al., "The role of Prosopis in ecological and landscape change in the Samaca Basin, lower Ica Valley, south coast Peru from the Early Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period," Latin American Antiquity 20(2):303-332 (2009)
• Christina A. Conlee, Beyond the Nasca Lines: Ancient Life at La Tiza in the Peruvian Desert (University Press of Florida, 2016)
• Lars Fehren-Schmitz et al., "Climate change underlies global demographic, genetic, and cultural transitions in pre-Columbian southern Peru," PNAS 111(26):9443-9448 (2014)
• Masato Sakai et al., "AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose," PNAS (2024)
• Kelly J. Knudson, Sloan R. Williams et al., "The geographic origins of Nasca trophy heads using strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope data," Journal of Anthropological Archaeology (2009)
• Markus Reindel and Gunther A. Wagner (eds.), New Technologies for Archaeology: Multidisciplinary Investigations in Palpa and Nasca, Peru (2009)
• Giuseppe Orefici, Cahuachi: Capital Teocratica Nasca (2012)