Ever heard of the Nasca Lines? They're literal lines etched in the sands of southern Peru covering an area of nearly 1,000 square kilometers, which depict over 300 different figures including animals and plants. The best evidence suggests that they're pre-Columbian in origin, dating from between roughly 500 BC and 500 AD, and that they might mark solstice points or serve as offerings to ancient deities. Although the Nasca Lines have been studied for decades (and more intensely since they were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1994), they've yet to be fully mapped. Yamagata used IBM's Watson Machine Learning Accelerator (WMLA) -- a framework designed to handle large-scale workloads spanning clusters of machines -- to expedite their analyses.

Researchers surveying in southern Peru with drones have captured images of ancient geoglyphs, and more than 50 of the massive ancient drawings are considered new discoveries by archaeologists. Etched into the high desert of southern Peru more than a millennium ago, the enigmatic Nasca lines continue to capture our imagination. More than a thousand of these geoglyphs (literally, 'ground drawings') sprawl across the sandy soil of Nasca province, the remains of little-understood ritual practices that may have been connected to life-giving rain. Now, Peruvian archaeologists armed with drones have discovered more than 50 new examples of these mysterious desert monuments in adjacent Palpa province, traced onto the earth's surface in lines almost too fine to see with the human eye. In addition, archaeologists surveyed locally known geoglyphs with drones for the first time--mapping them in never-before-seen detail.