Been down this rabbit hole for a while now, and honestly the ". Landing strip". Hypothesis always felt too lazy to me. But a calendar system tied to seasonal astronomical events? That's actually got legs.
María Reiche spent decades mapping the alignments and found credible correlations with solstices and the Pleiades rising. The lines pointing toward specific horizon points during planting and harvest seasons makes practical sense for an agricultural society dependent on the Andes' brutal seasonal shifts.
What interests me more is the intersection with water. A significant number of lines converge near underground aquifers. So you've potentially got a system that's simultaneously:
Marking astronomical calendars, Indicating subsurface water sources, Functioning as processional routes for ritual activity
That's not primitive thinking - that's sophisticated landscape engineering layered with multiple functions.
The ley line parallels here are obvious to anyone who's followed that research. The idea that ancient cultures encoded practical geographic and astronomical data into landscape features isn't fringe anymore, it's increasingly mainstream archaeology.
Where I remain genuinely uncertain is whether the scale was intentional or incidental. Did they need them that large, or did the size emerge from communal ritual participation over generations?
Anyone looked at Anthony Aveni's comparative work on this? He cross-referenced Nazca with other Andean geoglyph traditions and the astronomical alignment data is pretty compelling without requiring any exotic explanations.
What's everyone else's read - purely ceremonial, purely functional, or genuinely both?