Did the Nazca Lines actually work as some kind of landing calendar for seasonal events?

Been down this rabbit hole for a while now and honestly the astronomical alignment angle makes way more sense to me than the "ancient aliens built a runway" crowd. Like yeah the lines are massive and visible from the air but that doesn't automatically mean they were made for aircraft, right.

What gets me is the way certain lines point directly toward where the sun rises during solstices. That's not coincidence. You don't carve hundreds of miles of geoglyph into a desert by accident and accidentally nail the winter solstice alignment.

My theory - and I know this is rough - is that the figures and the lines served different purposes. The animals were probably ceremonial or religious, but the straight lines might've been a giant calendar system marking when to plant, when to expect rains, seasonal stuff like that.

Anyone here actually looked into the Maria Reiche research? She spent decades on this and the astronomical connection she found is pretty compelling. Curious what people think about whether the lines were more functional than ritual or if those two things were even seperate concepts to the Nazca people.

@Marko49 the astronomical calendar theory has some solid backing - Anthony Aveni's work on this in the 80s showed a bunch of the lines point toward where water sources appear during seasonal cycles, which ties into the hydraulic calendar idea more than any alien runway nonsense.

What gets me though is the trapezoids. If it was purely about tracking celestial events you'd expect more linear precision, but some of those wide cleared areas don't align with anything obvious astronomically. There's a theory I keep coming back to that they were processional pathways - people walking them as a ritual act tied to the calendar rather than passive observation points. Johan Reinhard wrote about this in relation to mountain worship and water fertility rites across Andean cultures generally.

The lines being "seen from the air" thing always gets overplayed. Ground-level ritual use fits the archaeological context far better in my view.