Calling this a water cult as the primary focus of the article seems a little extreme.

A much easier explanation for most of the features of the stones is that they're primarily functional for a herding / livestock based society.

- "deliberately placed [...] near melting snow streams, springs and the seasonal movement of herding groups" - herd animals need water. In snow covered mountains, its difficult to identify where the water is. Large stones help you guide your herd to water sources.

- "Each one is carved and polished on all faces" - They're visually distinctive and stand out from a large distance on wide open alpine fields. They're polished, and carved, so they look obviously different than some quasi-random rock in the surrounding area and shine in the sunshine.

- "heaviest monuments [were] dragged [...] high into the mountains" - Snow is heaviest at high elevations, thereby requiring large monuments to be able to identify them no matter the snow amount on the ground. Small monuments are only necessary at low elevations because of limited obscuring issues.

- Even the fish / cow thing may have had functional meaning. "There are fish here, go fishing." "This is a good place herd cattle."