Tiwanaku

Tues 14th
Up and breakfasted, we were collected around 8:30 and piled into a battered old mini bus to take a tour to Tiwanaku, the capital city of the Tiwanaku culture (that we had learnt about on the Isla del Sol). The journey took us through streets filled with markets and crowded with people and then out onto the high antiplano (high plains) where cattle, pig and sheep were tethered across the landscape between patches of potatoes, beans and quinoa. Our first stop was a museum housing artefacts from each phase of occupation in Bolivia.
The first evidence of human activity here is from 20,000 BC with stone tools and arrow heads, a hunter gatherer culture. The Tiwanaku culture (along with 2 others that eventually merged with the Tiwanaku) emerged in around 1500BC (that's about the time of the Hamurabi, before the Greeks and the Romans), their first acheivement was to domesticate the llama and to build settlements with fields of maize, potatoes (over 300 types) and quinoa along the shores of lake Titicaca. About 200AD they started their temple building phase and then later their statue building phase. The city of Tiwanaku was built on the shores of lake Titicaca at a time when the water level was much higher and covered the 12km between the current shoreline and the city, they built canals between raised fields and fished the lake for food. In about 800AD they conquered both the jungle region to the east and the coastal region to the west and this then lead to the break up of the culture into 5 different cultures in different areas, one of these slightly to the north eventually became the Incas.
The museum had ceramics from each of these phases; bone work, from which they made pins, needles and flutes, and also metal work (copper and Tin used to make bronze) that was made into clamps to hold large stones together in their building efforts, clothes pins and ceremonial knives. Small amounts of gold work have also been found but most has been robbed from the site. It also had an example of a mummy wrapped up in a sack made of dry grass with its head poking out so that it could be given food and drink once a year at the new year (the summer solstice/shortest day for this slightly southern region). Mummification involved removing the intestines and then curling up the knees into the abdominal cavity , the foetal position to allow them to be born again into the next life, they were treated with the liquid that was remove from their freeze-dried potatoes (which they could store for up to 20 years). They also had several skulls showing clear evidence of cranial manipulation to make the skull taller. Apparently this was done to signify people of the upper classes but the upper class was not as we would think today. Children were chosen to be upper class during their first year of life, the first to walk or speak were chosen and their heads wrapped in tight cloths until they were around 14 years old, they would become the priests and shaman of the future.
The largest of the statues (7m tall and 19 tons) found at the site was housed in another museum and we weren't allowed to photograph it but I snuck a quick shot; however, it doesn't show the amazing detail of the carvings on the statue. The statue is of a priest holding ceramic jars filled with offerings, it has a masked face with extra eyes to see the future and a hat and tunic resplendent with pictures of sun warriors, condor warriors, puma and fish; all sacred symbols of the culture. The condor represents the sky, the puma the earth and the fish the water and underworld. The back of the head shows braids which made the first archeologists think that the priests were female (but in fact both sexes wore their hair long and braided), and the leggings have circular images (48 of them) that represent the weeks of the year (another 4 weeks are not shown as these are the weeks of celebration at the important times of the year - the equinoxes and solstices).
Then out to see the practically robbed out site, the astronomical pyramid of Kalasasaya which is nearly completely destroyed and looks like a mound of dirt with a few remaining huge stone walls and evidence of amazing drainage systems with gutters and drainage hole. On the top is the remains of a large cross which points to north, south, east and west and had a central pond which apparently was used to gaze at the stars (without having to look up!) but all the perfectly cut stones were robbed out to build the catholic church in the nearby town. Near the top there are also the remains of ritual rooms with double walls the gap filled with mud (an early form of cavity filled walls). Below, there is a sunken temple in which the largest statue was found, its interior wall is decorated with stone heads, probably the heads of the important people in the society. When they were first found some stories of alien contact were circulated due to the fact that a couple of the heads look alien in nature.
A large raised temple is next to the sunken temple with 2 more statues on the top and the 'Sun door', Puerta del Sol which is an amazing piece of carving out of one piece of stone which depicts the god Viracocha (the sun god) with sun and condor warriors and the sun. Originally these carvings were plated with gold that has all been robbed out. The rock has split in two parts because the original foot long pins made from bronze that inserted into the base of the door and into the floor had been robbed away allowing it to fall and break. The bronze clamps that held together rocks in the building have also been robbed away just leaving the marks where they originally clamped.
There is also a cemetary at the site where the important people (with the pointy skulls) were buried in tombs around the edge of a large ceremonial square. Of course the tombs were openable so that food and drink could be put inside.
The incredible thing about all these huge carvings and building stones is that the rock (which is either red sandstone or grey granite) was all brought from kilometers away and the culture did not know the wheel. They assume that they must have used reed boats and tree trunks to have moved the pieces which in some cases way up to 40 tons.
The last thing we visited was the 'Puma Port', Puerto del Puma which also had amazing carved doorways and elaborately carved stone buildings and wharves. However the state of this site is even worse than that at the temple and pyramid. But there are a few rocks with the Andean cross on and other geometric designs that have been protected from weathering by their being tumbled and then covered; these show an amazing smoothness in the way the rock was cut, quite incredible after 2000 years.

There is one archeologist who has a different time line for the site. He beleives that the Tiwanaku were a very advanced culture before a great flood that killed most of them off and left a few to carry on the culture in a more basic way (there is a story of an ancient devastating flood in the Ayamara culture, like the biblical flood) . His studies have shown that the buildings were aligned with stars and that due to the regular change in the alignment of the earth to the stars due to changes in our orbit that the temple must have been built in around 3500BC (these calculations have been confirmed by other independent astronomers). He points to the precision in the carving, some of which would be difficult to acheive with todays machinary without computers and points out that bronze, copper, gold, silver and Tin (the only metals attributed to the Tiwanaku) would not have been hard enough to have been used to make such carvings.

We finished our tour and then ate quinoa soup in a local restaraunt before introducing ourselves to some local goats who had been tethered to eat around the railway line; then we all piled back into the minibus just as it started to hail really heavily and we made our way back to La Paz. As we entered the city we got caught up in the carnival and followed a dancing group of men dressed as women with enormous boobs down the street. Eventually we could hardly see out for the amount of foam that had been sprayed at us, but it was all very good natured and eventually they went one way and we went the other, arriving at our hostel at around 4.30pm. We chilled out in our room for an hour or so and then went out to dinner in a Dutch pub that served great steaks, satay chicken and apple pie, another great find.