Archaeologists have rediscovered and restored a huge geoglyph of a killer whale, “hiding” in a desert hillside in the isolated Palpa region of southern Peru. Researchers noted that the specific geoglyph had been lost over five decades ago.
Gigantic Ancient Geoglyph of an Orca Rediscovered
After years of investigation, restoration work, and analysis, scientists have come to the conclusion that the gigantic geoglyph is an orca. Researchers from the Commission for Archaeology of Non-European Cultures (KAAK) of the German Archaeological Institute collaborated on the project with other partners, suggest that the 230-foot-long (70 meters) figure of an orca is considered a dominant, semi-mythical creature in ancient Peruvian mythology and is more than two millennia old, a fact that makes it one of the oldest geoglyphs in the Palpa area. „Perhaps it is the oldest geo-glyph of the Nazca era,“ Markus Reindel, archaeologist from KAAK and head of the Nasca Palpa project, told the German newspaper Welt.
Johny Isla, an archaeologist and director of Peru’s Ministry of Culture in Ica province, which includes the Palpa and Nazca valleys, told Live Science that he saw a picture of the orca pattern for the first time back in 2013, during a research on geoglyphs at the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn. “The photograph appeared in an archaeological catalog of geoglyphs printed in the 1970s, which was based on research carried out in Palpa and Nazca by German archaeologists in the 1960s,” Isla said via Live Science. And added, “But the location and size of the orca geoglyph were not well-described in the catalog. As a result, the glyph’s whereabouts in the desert hills of the Palpa Valley, about 250 miles south of Lima, were by then unknown to local people or to scientists.”
Soon after he returned to Peru, Isla looked for the orca geoglyph on Google Earth and then on foot. „It was not easy to find it, because the [location and description] data were not correct, and I almost lost hope. However, I expanded the search area and finally found it a few months later in January 2015,” he says as Live Science reports.
The petroglyph before restoration began in 2015. Erosion had obscured the ancient orca geoglyph. (Image: Johny Isla)
Unique Orca Art
Next, Isla organized a team of six experts from Peru’s Ministry of Culture in order to clean and restore the orca geoglyph earlier in 2017, as the geoglyph was wearing away due to erosion and the passage of time. „Being drawn on a slope, it is easier [for it] to suffer damage than [for] those figures that are in flat areas, such as those of the Nazca Pampa,“ Isla says according to Live Science .
Die Goldene Landschaft 