Satellite Discovers Pyramid at Nazca.

You may have caught this on MSNBC, but Italian researchers studying imagery from the Quickbird satellite discovered a 97,000-square-foot pyramid on the banks of Peru’s Nazca river:

The discovery doesn’t come as a surprise to archaeologists, since some 40 mounds at Cahuachi are believed to contain the remains of important structures.

“We know that many buildings are still buried under Cahuachi’s sands, but until now, it was almost impossible to exactly locate them and detect their shape from an aerial view,” Masini told Discovery News. “The biggest problem was the very low contrast between adobe, which is sun-dried earth, and the background subsoil.”

Cahuachi is the best-known site of the Nazca civilization, which flourished in Peru between the first century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. and slid into oblivion by the time the Inca Empire rose to dominate the Andes.

So, by using these satellite scans, we could possibly finally figure out what the deal is with the famous lines.

Tags: archaeology, space exploration