Did the Nazca Lines actually serve as landing markers or is that theory completely dead now?

The landing strip theory never fully dies, does it - it just gets rebranded every few years when a new documentary needs ratings.

That said, I do think the conventional ". Ritual/astronomical calendar". Explanation has the strongest evidence behind it. The lines align with solstices, water sources, mountain sightlines. Functional, grounded, deeply human. The soil compaction argument against landing strips is also pretty damning - the surface is genuinely too soft for any craft of meaningful mass.

Where it gets interesting for me is the scale question. Some of these figures are only coherent from altitude. That doesn't require extraterrestrials - it could simply mean the Nazca were creating offerings visible to sky deities. But you can see why people stretch toward wilder conclusions.

I've been doing EVP work across various sites in Cheshire recently, nothing remotely comparable, but it's made me think more carefully about why ancient cultures oriented things the way they did. Ley line research keeps pulling me back to the idea that these civilisations were acutely aware of landscape in ways we've largely lost. The Nazca Lines might be the most dramatic expression of that awareness rather than evidence of outside intervention.

The ancient astronaut angle is culturally sticky but archaeologically thin.

Curious what others make of the aquifer/water ritual theory - that feels underexplored compared to the flashier explanations. Anyone dug into that angle?

The landing strip idea always falls apart for me when you actually look at the soil composition - those lines would've been unusable after a single landing, the ground is far too soft. But I don't think that automatically validates the astronomical calendar theory either, because some of the figures simply don't align with anything meaningful in the sky. What gets overlooked is the water hypothesis, that the lines may have been processional routes connected to water worship and irrigation rituals. Maria Reiche spent decades on the astronomical angle and her work is solid in places, but even she couldn't account for all of it. I'd rather sit with "we genuinely don't know" than force a tidy explanation.