One of the Nazca drawings could be a labyrinth

Science News : Dating from the period of the Nazca civilization, the famous large-scale drawings in the Peruvian desert have puzzled archaeologists for almost a century. Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester and Nicholas Saunders of the University of Bristol, both in the UK, believe that at least one of the patterns is a walkable labyrinth. Because the pattern can only be seen clearly from the air, walkers would not have known what path they were taking. The path Ruggles and Saunders examined consists of 15 sharp turns, several large curves around hills, and even a spiral, before ending about 60 m away from where it began. They believe the total walking time would have been only about one hour. The two researchers had to reconstruct parts of the path that had been washed away by rain, and it took four years of fieldwork to piece together a map of the full labyrinthine pattern. Although they don’t know the reason why people would have walked the labyrinth, Ruggles and Saunders point to the lack of damage to the rocks lining the paths as evidence that the paths were well taken care of.