YAMAGATA, JAPAN—ArtNet News reports that four Nazca geoglyphs have been identified in Peru through the use of artificial intelligence by a team of researchers led by Masato Sakai of Yamagata University. Over a period of five years, the team members manually identified geoglyphs in aerial photographs of the Nazca plateau and confirmed many of them with onsite surveys. Then, the researchers collaborated with IBM to combine a kind of machine learning called deep learning and field surveys in the search for geoglyphs, in a process estimated to be 21 times faster than looking for them with the naked eye. The four newly found geoglyphs include a humanoid figure holding a club, a wide-mouthed fish, a pair of legs measuring 255 feet long, and a skeletal image of a bird. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Journal of Archaeological Science. For more on the Nazca Lines, go to "Partially Identified Flying Objects."
