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Author: Nazca Lines Tour Editorial Team
Quick Summary: The Nazca Lines were made between roughly 500 BC and AD 500, which makes the oldest around 2,500 years old. But that single range hides the more interesting fact: they aren’t all one age. The hillside figures near Palpa are centuries older than the giant animals on the flat pampa, and the site was in continuous use for something like a thousand years. Dating them is genuinely difficult, because a design made by moving stones leaves almost nothing a laboratory can measure.
UNESCO dates the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa to between 500 BC and AD 500. That’s the figure you’ll see most often, and it’s a reasonable summary.
Put in perspective, the oldest geoglyphs here were being made at roughly the same time as the Parthenon in Athens, and the tradition was still going when the Roman Empire was at its height. It ended around 800 years before the Inca empire existed.
But “the Nazca Lines are 2,000 years old” is a bit like saying “European cathedrals are 700 years old.” It’s broadly true and it flattens a long, changing history.
Researchers generally divide geoglyph-making in this region into distinct periods.
| Phase | Approximate dates | Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Early / Chavín-influenced | ~500–300 BC | Figures formed by piling stones; simpler forms |
| Paracas | ~400–200 BC | Hillside placement near Palpa; humanoid motifs; visible from below |
| Nazca | ~200 BC – AD 650 | Giant figures on the flat pampa; animals and plants; vast straight lines and trapezoids |
Some researchers also identify later additions during the Wari period, after around AD 650, when highland groups moved into the region.
The practical consequence for a visitor: the figures you see on a flight over the Nazca pampa are mostly from the later phase. The genuinely older work is at Palpa, roughly 50 km north, and it looks different — human forms on slopes rather than animals on flats.
Most archaeological dating relies on organic material or on stratigraphy — layers built up over time. A Nazca geoglyph offers neither. It’s a shape made by moving pebbles that were already there. There’s nothing to carbon-date in the line itself, and no layers, because nothing was constructed.
So researchers work indirectly, using several approaches together:
Each method has real limitations. Offerings may have been left long after a line was made. Stakes may have been replaced. Stylistic dating assumes motifs didn’t persist across periods, which they often did. This is why published dates carry wide margins.
There’s an important distinction that gets lost in most summaries: the date a geoglyph was made and the period it was used are different questions.
Evidence from platforms and offerings suggests some lines were maintained, revisited and re-cleared over long periods. A geoglyph created in 100 BC might still have been an active ritual site in AD 400. Some appear to have been deliberately modified, with new lines cut across older ones.
That’s a more accurate mental model than a single construction date. These weren’t monuments finished and left alone. They were a working landscape that people kept using.
A shallow groove in the ground should not survive two millennia. That it has comes down to an unusually stable environment:
The threat isn’t time. It’s people — vehicles crossing the pampa, unauthorised access, encroachment at the margins, and flooding during strong El Niño years. A tyre track in this landscape can persist for centuries, which is precisely why walking among the figures isn’t permitted.
That 2024 result reshapes the age question in an indirect way. A large share of the newly found figures are small relief-type geoglyphs of the type associated with the earlier tradition. As the catalogue fills out, the balance between early and late work is being revised. Our article on the new Nazca Lines discovered covers what that survey found.
Two things worth carrying into a flight.
First, you’re looking at a palimpsest. Lines cross other lines because they were drawn centuries apart. What looks like chaotic overlap from the air is actually a record of successive generations working over the same ground. Once you notice the crossings, the pampa reads less like a gallery and more like a document written over repeatedly.
Second, you’ll see a small fraction of it. The protected property covers over 75,000 hectares, and the core geoglyph area is around 450 km². A standard flight of 30–35 minutes from the María Reiche Neuman aerodrome covers a circuit of the best-known figures — a route, not the whole site. Flights departing from Pisco spend longer in transit and correspondingly less time over the geoglyphs themselves.
“Spent 15 minutes or so over the Nazca lines themselves” — dselvan, Warrington, United Kingdom, August 2025
That’s the reality of a Pisco departure. If the geoglyphs are your priority rather than the convenience of flying from further north, departing from Nazca itself puts you over the figures sooner and for longer. Our Nazca Lines tour guide sets out how the flight day works.
If you want to see the older end of the tradition, the Palpa geoglyphs sit on hillsides about 50 km north of Nazca and can be viewed from the ground — a genuinely different experience from the flat-pampa figures, and closer to how the earliest examples were meant to be seen.
Are the Nazca Lines older than the pyramids?
No. The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC, roughly two thousand years before the earliest Nazca geoglyphs. The Nazca Lines are contemporary with classical Greece and Rome rather than with ancient Egypt. They’re also much younger than Peru’s own oldest monumental sites — Caral, on the coast north of Lima, dates to around 2600 BC and is broadly contemporary with the Egyptian pyramids. The Nazca Lines are ancient, but they sit in the middle of Peru’s long archaeological record rather than at the start of it.
Which Nazca figures are the oldest?
The hillside geoglyphs near Palpa, associated with the Paracas culture and generally dated to around 400–200 BC, are the older group. They tend to depict humanoid figures and are placed on slopes so they can be seen from the valley floor below. The famous animal figures on the flat Nazca pampa — the Hummingbird, Condor, Monkey and Spider — belong to the later Nazca phase, from roughly 200 BC onward. Dating individual figures precisely remains difficult, so these are period attributions rather than firm dates for specific geoglyphs.
How do archaeologists date lines made of moved stones?
Indirectly, by dating things found with the lines rather than the lines themselves. Wooden stakes recovered at the ends of some geoglyphs can be radiocarbon dated. Pottery left as offerings at line ends can be matched to dated ceramic styles. Optically stimulated luminescence can estimate how long the piled edge stones have been in their current position. And where lines cross, the sequence of overlaps establishes which came first. No single method is decisive, so dates are usually given as ranges built from several lines of evidence.
Are new Nazca Lines still being found?
Yes, and at a faster rate than at any point in the site’s study. The 2024 AI-assisted survey by Yamagata University and IBM Research confirmed 303 previously unrecorded figures during six months of fieldwork, after machine learning flagged candidate locations across 629 km² of aerial imagery for archaeologists to verify on foot. Most are small relief-type geoglyphs that were simply too modest to spot in earlier surveys. Further candidates flagged by the system remain to be checked, so the catalogue is expected to keep growing.
Will the Nazca Lines survive much longer?
The natural outlook is good — the conditions that preserved them for two thousand years haven’t changed, and there’s no meaningful erosion in an environment with almost no rain, wind or vegetation. The risks are human and recent. Vehicles driving onto the pampa leave scars that last for centuries, and there have been several well-publicised incidents of damage from unauthorised access. Urban and agricultural pressure at the edges of the protected zone is a longer-term concern, as is flooding during exceptional El Niño years. Access restrictions and the requirement to view from aircraft or designated platforms exist precisely to manage this.
The dates in this guide are commonly cited ranges rather than settled values, and different researchers define the Paracas, Nazca and Wari cultural periods differently — expect variation between sources. Dating individual geoglyphs is genuinely difficult and most published dates carry wide margins of uncertainty. The three-phase framework described here is a useful simplification of a more contested picture. Because survey work is ongoing and the catalogue of known geoglyphs is still growing, both totals and the balance between early and late figures are provisional. On the practical side, flight prices, routes, aerodrome fees and schedules change regularly, flights are weather-dependent, and access rules for protected areas can be revised. Reconfirm details before you travel.