Nazca lines may be a labyrinth Prof Clive Ruggles of Leicester University said: "Unlike some of the famous zoomorphic (animal) figures, its irregular form provides no reason to speculate that it might have been intended to be viewed from the air. It was not meant to be 'seen' from outside at all, but rather to be experienced from within. It was meant to be walked. Prof Ruggles and Dr Nicholas Saunders of Bristol University traced 4.4km of paths during a five-year project, becoming the first known people to do so in more than 1,000 years. Writing in the Antiquity journal, they suggested the network of patterns was laid out around 500AD. The well-preserved state of the labyrinth suggests it was only ever walked by small groups of people in single file and indicates a possible spiritual purpose, they said. Although parts of the lines have been washed away by flash floods, the remainder is well preserved and the edges are still sharply defined. Prof Ruggles claims to have been the first person to discover the labyrinth among the patterns while studying the lines in 1984. He said: "I didn't have the slightest idea of its true nature. Only gradually did I realise that here was a figure set out on a huge scale and still traceable, that it was clearly intended for walking, and that I was almost certainly the first person to have recognised it for what it was, and walked it from end to end, for some 1500 years. Sharing some of those experiences by walking the lines ourselves is an important source of information that complements the 'hard' scientific and archaeological evidence and can really aid our attempts to make anthropological sense of it.