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Nazca

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The Nazca were the people of the southern Peruvian coast from about 100 BCE to 800 CE, known above all for the geoglyphs they cut into the desert plateau, straight lines, trapezoids and figures of animals and plants on a scale visible only from the surrounding hills or the air. The lines are best understood as ritual paths, walked rather than viewed, and many run toward water sources in a desert where water is the governing religious concern; the underground aqueducts they built are still in use. Their polychrome pottery and textiles carry a repeating cast of beings, and the trophy heads found in their burials belong to a practice whose meaning is still argued.

Facts
Open Questions
Language Family
Not linguistically identified. The Nazca left no writing, and although the south coast of Peru is Quechua and Aymara speaking today, that reflects the Inca-era and colonial-era spread of those language families centuries after Nazca civilization had already ended around 800 CE. No direct evidence ties either family, or any other, to the Nazca population itself. 3
Scholarship on the pre-Inca south coast (Adelaar and Muysken, The Languages of the Andes, 2004) finds few traces of any indigenous language family besides Quechuan and Aymaran in the central Peruvian area, but treats a Quechuan or Aymaran tie for cultures such as Nazca and Paracas specifically as speculative rather than established, since it rests on colonial-era impressions rather than direct evidence contemporary with the Nazca themselves.
Disputed
Principal Religious Traditions
Known only from what was left in the ground: the geoglyphs cut into the desert plateau, now generally read as lines to be walked or processed along rather than viewed; the ceramic and textile iconography of a beaked being and of trophy heads; and offering at the huaca. No text survives, so every religious reading of the Nazca is inference. 2
Origins
Origin Region
The river valleys and desert of the southern Peruvian coast, around the Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, from about 100 BCE to 800 CE. 1
Practice
Practice Status
Discontinued as a state religion 2
Learn More
Lines Meant to Be Walked

The Nazca lines were made by clearing the dark oxidised stones of the desert pavement to expose the pale ground beneath, and because it almost never rains there they have survived. They fall into three kinds: long straight lines running for kilometres, geometric trapezoids and spirals, and the biomorphs, figures of a hummingbird, a monkey, a spider, a whale and others, which are the most famous and by far the least numerous.

Helaine Silverman and Donald Proulx's survey sets out the leading interpretation. Many of the lines converge on centres, and they are associated with water: they run towards the mountains from which the underground water comes, they are found near the spiral shafts that give access to the water table, and they were made in a place where water is the governing problem. The figures are drawn in a single continuous line that can be walked without crossing itself, which supports processional use, and the pottery deliberately broken along them points the same way.

Maria Reiche, who surveyed and protected them for decades from the 1940s, argued for astronomical alignments, and statistical testing has not supported that as a general explanation. The atlas records the ceremonial and water related reading as the position most sources now hold, and the astronomical one as tested and not sustained.

Prepared Heads, Cahuachi and the End of the Water

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Nazca (Encyclopaedia Britannica), Sources

This source names Nazca directly: "Britannica's reference entry on the Nazca culture of the south coast of Peru, its lines, geoglyphs and textile art."

Source Nazca (Encyclopaedia Britannica)The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Nazca Religion, Religions
Source The NascaHelaine Silverman and Donald A. Proulx
The Andes, Regions

The Nazca lived on the southern Peruvian coast, at the edge of the Andes.

Contained In

Andean Peoples, Cultures

The Nazca are one of the Andean peoples.

Originated In

Peru, Countries
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
The Andes, Regions
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology
Gary Urton, University of Texas Press, 1981
3. The Languages of the Andes
Willem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken, Cambridge University Press, 2004
The Nasca
Helaine Silverman and Donald A. Proulx, Blackwell, 2002View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
What language did the Nazca people themselves speak?

The Nazca (about 100 BCE to 800 CE) left no writing system, so no text records their own speech. The Quechua and Aymara families dominant on the Peruvian south coast today arrived through Inca imperial expansion in the fifteenth century and Spanish colonial administration afterward, six hundred years or more after Nazca civilization had already ended, so their modern presence cannot be read backward onto the Nazca population. Scholarship on Andean historical linguistics treats a Quechuan or Aymaran tie for the pre-Inca south coast cultures as speculative, resting on colonial-era impressions of multilingualism that may equally reflect internal variation within those two families elsewhere in the Andes.

What would resolve this A securely dated Nazca-period inscription would settle it outright, but none has been found and the culture is understood to have had no writing system at all. Short of that, a documented layer of loanwords or toponyms in a later, attested language that can be traced specifically and exclusively to the pre-Inca Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, rather than to the wider post-Inca Quechua-speaking Andes, would be evidence a historical linguist could evaluate.
Historical linguistics, archaeologyWillem F. H. Adelaar with Pieter C. Muysken, The Languages of the Andes
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