Living near Rendlesham I'm used to things that don't make sense until you change your perspective, and honestly the Nazca Lines feel exactly the same - completely bonkers from ground level, blindingly obvious from above.
The irrigation map theory is genuinely compelling though. Johan Reinhard's work on the lines connecting to mountain water sources has always sat better with me than ". Aliens drew a runway" (no offence to my UFO lot). The fact that several lines point directly toward underground aquifers is suspiciously convenient for a civilisation in one of the driest places on Earth.
What really gets me is that the Nazca people weren't primitive - they engineered the puquios, those spiral intake wells, which are frankly more impressive than anything I built in the Army. If they could crack underground hydraulics, mapping water flow routes on a massive scale seems entirely within their capability.
The animal geoglyphs potentially representing water-associated deities adds another layer - ritual AND practical, like a sacred OS map.
My main sticking point: why make them so enormous? A functional irrigation map doesn't need to be visible from the stratosphere. Unless the scale itself was part of the ritual communication with whatever they believed controlled rainfall.
Anyone dug into Maria Reiche's surveys alongside the more recent LiDAR imaging from the Yamagata University team? The newer scans revealed hundreds of previously unknown figures and I reckon there's still proper answers buried in that data.
What's everyone's take - purely ceremonial, purely functional, or both running simultaneously? Because my gut (and 15 years dealing with things that defy easy categorisation) says it's never just one thing.