Nazca is a culture of the southern Peruvian coast from roughly 100 BCE to 800 CE, and its polychrome pottery is among the most technically accomplished in the ancient Americas, painted before firing in a dozen or more slip colours, with deities that have whiskered mouth masks, streaming appendages and heads hanging from them.
Those heads are real. Several hundred prepared human heads have been recovered, pierced at the forehead for a carrying cord, the base of the skull opened and the lips pinned. Argument over whether they are war trophies or the venerated dead of the same community has run for a century, and isotope analysis indicates that most came from the same population as the people who kept them, which does not settle the question but narrows it considerably.
Cahuachi, the largest Nazca site, has few ordinary dwellings and a great deal of ceremonial construction, and is now read as a pilgrimage centre rather than a city, used periodically by people who lived elsewhere. Its abandonment coincides with a period of environmental stress, and the clearing of the deep rooted huarango tree that stabilised the valley floors and the water table is a leading explanation for the collapse that followed. The people did not vanish. The settlement pattern that supported the ceremonial centre did.