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These 1,700-year-old aqueducts built by the Nasca people in Peru are an engineering marvel

Many of these pre-Inca structures are still in use today. Here's how they work.

Diego Delso/Wikimedia Commons

The reason for the strange spiral shapes was partially a mystery until 2016.

From above, the Cantalloc Aqueducts look like an artistic installation of some sort, strings of aesthetically pleasing spirals lined up in perfect rows. But these pre-Inca-era creations have a perfectly practical purpose.

The Cantalloc Aqueducts are the best known part of the aqueduct system built by the Nasca (also spelled Nazca) people some 1,700 years ago in the desert of southern Peru. Due to the scarcity of water in this region—droughts here can last for years—the Nasca relied on getting water from the underground water table. But they didn't just create traditional wells to access the aquifer. They constructed an elaborate—yet brilliantly simple—system to channel water from the aquifer wherever they wanted it to go.

The spiral structures, called ojos ("eyes" in Spanish), are made of stone and wood up to 45 feet (15 meters) deep, and they connect to a series of underground aqueducts and surface channels (known collectively as puquios) that irrigate the arid landscape for farming and provide water for domestic use. Up until 2016, it was assumed the ojos were used as wells and access points for maintenance of the aqueducts. But Rosa Lasaponara and others from the Institute of Methodologies for Environmental Analysis in Italy discovered another reason for their shape.

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