Been down to Peru twice and stood near the lines and honestly the sheer scale of them makes the "religious runway for gods" theory feel a bit lazy to me. The water mapping idea has always made more sense on a practical level - these people needed to survive in one of the driest places on earth, right?
There's actually decent evidence that some of the lines correlate with underground aquifers and seasonal water flow. A researcher called David Johnson did work on this years back and it never really got the mainstream attention it deserved.
What gets me though is why you'd need a hummingbird or a spider to mark a water source. Why the figures at all? That part doesn't quite fit the purely practical explanation. Maybe the two things coexisted - some lines were functional, some were ceremonial, and we keep trying to find one single answer when the Nazca probably had a more complicated relationship with the landscape than we give them credit for.
Anyone here looked into the Johnson hypothesis properly? Curious what people think.