Discovering the Tiwanaki

Most of you have probably heard of the Inca civilization which built Macchu Pichu etc. What I didn’t realize before I got here was that the Incas were only really around for about 300 years. How then, did they develop such advanced astronomy, pottery, building techniques etc. They had those because the Incas emerged from the remnants of an amazing civilization that over its 6 epochs lasted around 3,000 years – the Tiwanaki.

Before I got to Bolivia I had never heard of the Tiwanaki, and it isn’t really surprising. Most early finds about them were recorded and published as having been Inca, hence the confusion. In our various visits to museums etc we had been hearing more and more about the Tiwanaki so today we decided to head out to Tiwanaku, 19km from Lake Titicaca which is believed to have been the centre of their empire which at its height reached from northern Peru to the north of Chile and Argentina and across into sub-tropical Bolivia.

We decided to go on a tour so we could properly understand the site which was a great idea because we had a fantastically knowledgeable guide. We jumped on a bus with about 25 other people mostly from Germany, Brazil and a couple of other Kiwis and took the 1.5 hour ride out to the site.

It is a HUGE site, although most of it is yet to be excavated. The main pyramid for example was 200mx200m making it second only in the world to the great pyramid at Giza. It was not as high, only 7 levels (a mystical number for the Tiwanaki) and so far indications indicate that it was used to calculate extremely accurate astronomical calculations. They have amazing calendars indicating their complete understanding of the solar year and their worship of the sun. It is believed that their skills in astronomy and mathematics far exceeded those of the Incas.

We started with a couple of museums. The first explained many of the pottery finds they have made on the site, as well as aspects of the culture including food and things like how the high born shaped their heads to have elongated skulls, similar to how several other cultures around the world also do. It was a really good start to understand the complexity of their skills and knowledge.

The second museum is under construction and will eventually house monuments from the diggings to preserve them against the weather etc. Right now you can only see one, but he is the largest monolith found so far. At over 6m tall, he was carved from a single piece of red sandstone. Unfortunately after his discovery he was taken to La Paz where he initially stood in a plaza and then in front of the football stadium. During that time, he suffered major damage from bullets during riots when people hid behind him to get away from the army and then also regularly had bottles smashed on him following home team losses at the football. The last 70 years have done more damage to him than the preceding hundreds of years since he was found.

From there we headed to the archeological site. As I mentioned they have only uncovered a fraction of what is there but you can see how impressive it must have been. What remains is probably only about 30% of the original. When the Spaniards arrived they tried to destroy the pagan culture (by then Tiwanaku had been taken over by the Incas who used it for ceremonial rather that astronomical purposes). They destroyed monoliths and carted away much of the stone to build their own city. If you can see a church in the background of some of the photos it was built with stone from the site. Where they couldn’t destroy monoliths due to the hardness of the stone, they carved in Christian symbols and then covered much of the site with soil. The rest of the site was covered over by a major flood later on.

As well as the pyramid, we saw a temple. It has all sorts of amazing features but one of the coolest is these holes carved in the walls which are shaped like a human ear. Someone speaking on the outside of the temple is hugely amplified into the temple. It also had two major gates, the moon gate which is still in the right position and a sun gate which has been moved as an English Lord in the late 1800s attempted to take it back to England but was disrupted when a war with Chile broke out.

Next to the temple is another construction, this one quite deep in the ground. It was here that the giant monolith was found and all around the edges are carvings of faces. It is believed that this has something to do with their belief in the underworld where the dead went.

After lunch we went to another site where due to lack of funds excavation has been abandoned. It contains stones which weigh hundreds of tones. The site is theorized as being a port as the lake would have been higher in those days.

Of course the massive weight of the stones, the distance they were transported and the amazing precision with which they are carved (some of the lines would be hard to achieve with modern machinery) have led to lots of speculation about extra-terrestrial assistance. Who knows, but however they built it, it is an amazing site and we had a really fascinating day discovering the Tiwanaki.