Beneath a sand dune near Zaña, Peru ... crafting fine works of art, and for their use of canals, reservoirs, and aqueducts. The Moche people were also known to practice human sacrifice.

This story appears in the November 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. I got my first lesson in the physics of sand dunes in 1998 on an expedition into the Sahara. In order to take aerial ...