Nazca monkey
A monkey drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru, about 110 metres long, with its tail wound into a spiral. It is one of the large animal figures of the Nazca lines, made by the Nazca culture about 2,000 years ago.
Meaning
The monkey is one of the giant line-drawn animals on the Pampa Colorada, northwest of Nazca. Its size depends on whom you ask: Britannica gives about 110 metres (360 feet), Peru’s news agency Andina 135 metres. A team writing in PNAS in 2024 found that the large figures of this kind are mostly wild animals, and that pottery of the Early Nasca period, AD 50 to 300, lies at the monkey, so it was in use by then. National Geographic lists it with the hummingbird and the spider as the figures that take shape out of the swirls and zigzags seen from a plane.
Origin and history
Britannica dates most of the lines to more than 2,000 years ago, the work of the Nazca culture, and the pottery the PNAS team recorded at the monkey belongs to that culture’s early period.
A forest animal in the desert
The anthropologist Johan Reinhard, as National Geographic reports him, points out that monkeys are found in the Amazon, a region with plenty of water. He thinks most of the lines led to places where rituals were held “to obtain water and fertility of crops”, and reads the animals in that light. The Nazca birds studied in 2019 point the same way: none of the species identified live in the Nazca region.
Is it a constellation?
María Reiche concluded that some of the animal figures were modelled on groups of stars, Britannica says. The PNAS team notes that this reading has been criticised as a Western view of the sky, since no historical or ethnographic record mentions such constellations.
Read next
See also
Nazca hummingbird, Nazca lines, Gateway of the Sun (the Staff God), Tumi (ceremonial knife), Inti (the Inca sun), Inti Raymi (festival of the sun).
Sources
- Nazca Lines, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
- Líneas de Nasca: misterio e historia que deslumbran al mundo, Agencia Andina (Peru’s state news agency), November 2016, Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina, article text
- AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose, by Masato Sakai and others, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121 (2024), e2407652121, doi:10.1073/pnas.2407652121, PNAS (PubMed Central full text), Introduction; Results
- Nasca lines, National Geographic, History and Culture, National Geographic, article text
- Partially Identified Flying Objects, Archaeology, September/October 2019 (Archaeological Institute of America), Archaeology magazine, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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