A bird ’s eye view over the desert of western Bolivia unveil thousand of stagnant - straight lines that were etch into the ground thousands of years ago . When on the dot , and why they were make , however , remains a second of a mystery .

have sex as the Sajama Lines , the geoglyphs are located in the tincture of the Nevado Sajama volcano , the highest peak in Bolivia , and cover up a huge patch of commonwealth that measure 22,525 square kilometers ( 8,697 straightforward Admiralty mile ) . That ’s around 15 times heavy than the area compensate by theNazca Linesin neighboring Peru .

The thousands of lines crisscross one another in a ostensibly disorderly entanglement . However , they were clear crafted with intent . The interlinking line stretch for 16,000 kilometers ( 9,941 miles ) in full and keep remarkable straightness throughout .

give this prodigious scale , it ’s sometimes called the mankind ’s largest work of art . originative facial expression was perhaps not its prize intention , though . Some archeologistsarguethe Sajama Lines were used as a way to moderate multitude to source of water , which is scarce in the domain .

Another viewis that they helped guide the great unwashed during a religious pilgrimage since the web of path is interlard with a serial publication of shrine , sepulture web site , and small village .

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have made exploit to study and map out the Sajama Lines with the aim of protect the consecrated landscape from natural eating away and gap from substructure development .

Each line is just a few meters across and was made by scraping aside the oxidate dingy surface material to expose the light subsurface material . This is a interchangeable method used to make the Nazca Lines , although these geoglyphsdepict figurative contour , like animals and plant , rather than abstract lines .

There ’s somespeculationthat the Sajama Lines are connected to the Nazca Lines . Perhaps they were both created by alike civilization that had tight links with one another .

While it ’s not clear who made the Sajama Lines , the Carangas the great unwashed are potential suspects , according to a2016 study . They lived in this realm of the southern Andes during the Late Intermediate Period 1,000 CE to 1476 CE , around the metre when most scholars trust the lines were invent .

Nevertheless , the exact tarradiddle of their ancestry remains shrouded in enigma .