“finding the needle in the haystack becomes practically impossible without the help of automation,”

 

 But the pampa is so immense that “finding the needle in the haystack becomes practically impossible without the help of automation,” said Marcus Freitag, an IBM physicist who collaborated on the project.

“It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative geoglyphs,” said Masato Sakai, an archaeologist at Yamagata University in Japan who has studied the lines for 30 years.

Dr. Sakai is the lead author of a survey published in September in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found 303 previously uncharted geoglyphs in only six months, almost doubling the number that had been mapped as of 2020. The researchers used artificial intelligence in tandem with low-flying drones that covered some 243 square miles. Their conclusions also provided insights into the symbols’ enigmatic purpose.