Scientists have solved an ancient Peruvian mystery from space

Business Insider

April 17, 2016

Archaeologists have used high-resolution satellite snapshots to finally piece together a mystery surrounding the ancient people of Peru's famous Nazca region. The mystery centers around a series of carefully built, spiraling holes called puquios, burrowed into the ground in the Nasca Desert of southern Peru. Now, Rosa Lasaponarac from the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis in Italy describes how she studied imagery shot from space to plot the distribution of the puquios and how they were related to nearby settlements — settlements that happened to be easier to date. It's now believed that the primary aim of the puquios were to enable communities to survive in an area continually hit by drought: they were essentially a cutting edge hydraulic system used to retrieve water from aquifers underground.