High Country News calls Alfredo Acosta Figueroa “the geoglyph guardian,” and that’s apt. For years, he’s been fighting to protect the geoglyphs of the American southwest, and even though he might have some non-traditional ideas about who made them and why, his attempts at preserving them are legit … if not tricky.

Figueroa still lives near his hometown of Blythe, California, which also happens to be the home of the Blythe Intaglios, a series of geoglyphs that include three groups of six figures each, including animals and people, that have been dated to anywhere from 450 and 2,000 years old. According to the Bureau of Land Management, the human figures represent the Creator and the animals are those who aided in creation — which makes it ironic that they’re now under threat.

The problem is energy: that area has become targeted for the installation of solar panels and arrays. While solar energy is something most people might get on board with, it’s the potential destruction of these ancient geoglyphs that’s the problem. And one of the Blythe Intaglios has already been damaged, during a road-widening project.

There’s a lot that’s still unknown about the geoglyphs. Figueroa thinks they’re connected to a long-lost Aztec homeland in the southwestern US, a theory that’s pretty far from mainstream. Other tribes have other ideas (the Mojave simply say they have always been there), but they’re united by the idea that they have to be saved.

The most famous geoglyphs are probably Peru’s Nazca lines. According to National Geographic, they’ve been the subject of study, speculation, and mystery since they were first studied in 1926. They’re mind-boggling huge: there’s more than 800 straight lines, 70 figures of plants and animals, and 300 geometric shapes. Some are larger than the Empire State Building, and that means they’re impossible to see from the ground.

So, what do we know? For starters, we haven’t found them all. In October 2020, news broke (via The Guardian) that archaeologists had found another figure, this one of a 121-foot-long cat, etched into a hillside and almost completely obscured because of erosion that had been chipping away at it. It was dated to between 500 BCE and 200, based on the style of the figure, and that’s a little outside the norm: Nat Geo says most researchers believe the lines were made by the Nasca people, between 1 and 700.

And that’s about all we know. For a long time, it was believed that the lines related to the movements of the stars and, in turn, to the clock, the calendar, and the seasons. By the 1970s, though, new theories were being developed. That includes the suggestion that they’re actually pointing to (or part of) ritual sites, many of which were used to appeal to the gods for rain or crop fertility. Were they? Who knows!

The sheer scale of the geoglyphs scattered across the Atacama Desert is mind-boggling. According to ThoughtCo., more than 5,000 geoglyphs have been discovered, sprawling over a section of Chilean desert that’s a shocking 60,000 square miles. While many are relatively simple geometric shapes like circles, arrows, and the stepped rhombus, there’s also a ton of animals. One of the most common is the llama, and some geoglyphs feature a line of as many as 80 llamas in a row. There’s also monkeys, dolphins, eagles, lizards, and serpents, along with human figures depicted doing things like hunting and fishing.

Like most of the world’s geoglyphs, we have no idea what these massive works of art mean, but there’s plenty of suggestions. Some think that given the number of geoglyphs that seem to depict llama caravans, some may have essentially acted as signposts to guide travelers through the harsh desert and point out things like salt flats and water sources. (And “harsh” is putting it mildly, as LiveScience says, the Atacama Desert averages less than a millimeter of rain per year.) Others think they’re ritual sites, or that they might be connected to astronomical alignments. 

Some of the geoglyphs are gathered in areas, like Chug-Chug. The World Monuments Fund says Chug-Chug is home to 23 sites and 500 geoglyphs, most made between 900 and 1550. A few have been dated to 1000 BCE, which makes it all that much more difficult to interpret.

Criss-crossing the Bolivian desert are lines — lots and lots of lines. According to Bolivian Life, they cover an area near the Sajama volcano that’s nearly 9,000 square miles, and the longest of the lines are an impressive 12 miles from start to finish. And here’s the thing — even though the Sajama Lines stretch an insane distance over uneven, rocky terrain, each of the thousands of lines is perfectly straight.

Amusing Planet says that from the ground, you’d never know they were there. It’s only from the air that researchers realized the sheer number of lines, which often start at the same point and radiate outwards. It’s been speculated that those origin points might indicate ancient settlements, sacred sites, or burial places, but no one’s sure what’s going on here.

And sadly, the lines haven’t gotten the same kind of attention as other geoglyphs. There was one — and only one — scientific study mounted by the University of Pennsylvania in 2003, but otherwise, it seems low on archaeology’s to-do list.

There’s a snake slithering along a hilltop in southern Ohio, and no one’s entirely sure how long it’s been there, why it was made, or what it’s supposed to mean. We do know, Cleveland says, that it’s the longest snake effigy in the world, and it stretches for a whopping 1,348 feet.

First, what else do we know? Not much. It’s been dated to around 1070 and the Fort Ancient Culture. However, SmartHistory says even that’s just the “leading theory,” as it’s entirely possible that the mound as it exists today was a refurbishment of a much older mound. We also know that it’s not a burial ground, although there are burial mounds in the area.

There’s been a lot of theories put forward on just what the massive serpent is. Some suggest it was plucked out of the night sky, perhaps representing a constellation or an astronomical event like a comet or a supernova. It may have been used as a compass, or to mark the changing seasons, or it may have been consulted to figure out when crops needed to be planted or harvested. And that makes sense: the head of the snake points toward the summer solstice, and the tail to the winter. Even the shape of the snake’s head has been hotly debated, with some suggesting it’s an egg, an eye, and even a frog being swallowed by the snake.