“They are clearly representations of identifiable people. “If the Nazca Lines were made by humans for the gods, these figures were made by humans for humans,” explained Castillo, a former minister of culture for Peru. “Placing these geoglyphs on the slopes means that, in contrast with the Nazca Lines, you can see them if you are standing in the valley below where life and agriculture is taking place,” he said.

The newly discovered geoglyphs’ location on hillsides, however, marks a key difference, said Luis Jaime Castillo, a Peruvian archaeologist working on the Nazca-Palpa project with Isla. They were created by removing the top layer of pebbles to reveal the lighter-coloured material beneath. More than a thousand of them – vast geometric patterns, and zoomorphic figures such as the monkey, the hummingbird and the whale – stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Nazca plateau. “This orca was made at a time of abundance and population growth in a moment of change from one society to another,” said Isla. The smaller forms were etched on hillsides in nearby Palpa by the Paracas and Topará cultures between 500BC and AD200. The archaeologists leading the effort now believe that the anthropomorphic orca figure fills in a missing link between hundreds of older geoglyphs and the Nazca culture’s desert etchings. New research with drones has helped uncover hundreds of such figures carved in the desert near the lines in Nazca but which predate them by as much as 1,500 years. The design carved into the hillside depicts a terrifying mythological beast, part orca but with a human arm holding a trophy head and several more heads inside its body.

Isla, now Peru’s chief archaeologist for the lines, spent hours poring through archives, before returning to Peru – armed with a drone and a lifetime of local field experience – to find it.Īfter several false starts, it took just two weeks to find the 25-by-65-metre image which had been hiding in plain sight in the hills of Palpa, about 30 miles north of Nazca, in a huge expanse of desert in southern Peru. The figure bore some resemblance to others he knew but he had never seen this one before. The photograph taken in the early 1970s showed a mysterious killer whale deity carved in an arid hillside.

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