The first important settlement around Titicaca was likely Chiripa, on a little peninsula on the lake’s southwest coast. Its ceremonial center, which may date to 900 B.C., was built around a Norte Chico–style sunken plaza. Chiripa was one of half a dozen small, competitive centers that emerged around the lake in that time. Most depended on raised-field agriculture, in which farmers grow crops on flat, artificially constructed surfaces created for the same reason that home gardeners grow vegetables on raised beds. (Similar but even larger expanses of raised fields are found in the Beni, the Mexican basin, and many other places.) By the time of Christ’s birth, two of these early polities had become dominant: Pukara on the northern, Peruvian edge of the lake and Tiwanaku on the opposite, Bolivian side. In the third century A.D., Pukara rather abruptly disintegrated politically. People still lived there, but the towns dispersed into the countryside; pottery making, stela carving, and monument building ceased. No one is certain why.
Although Tiwanaku has been occupied since at least 800 B.C., it did not become an important center until about 300 B.C. and did not expand out from southern Titicaca until about two hundred years after Pukara’s decline. But when it did reach out to its south and west, Tiwanaku transformed itself to become what Alan Kolata, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, has called a “predatory state.” It was not the centrally administered military power that term conjures. Instead, it was an archipelago of cities that acknowledged Tiwanaku’s religious preeminence. “State religion and imperial ideology,” Kolata argued, “performed much the same work as military conquest, but at significantly lower cost.” Awed by its magnificence, fearful of the supernatural powers controlled by its priesthood, local rulers subordinated themselves.
Central to this strategy of intimidation was Tiwanaku city. A past wonder of the world, it is badly damaged today. In the last two centuries, people have literally carted away many of its buildings, using the stones for churches, homes, bridges, public buildings, and even landfill. At one point the Bolivian government drove a railroad through the site (recently it laid a road through another part). Hands more enthusiastic than knowledgeable reconstructed many of the remaining buildings. Still, enough remains to get a sense of the ancient city.
Dominating its skyline was a seven-tiered pyramid, Akapana, laid out in a pattern perhaps inspired by the Andean cross. Ubiquitous in highlands art, the Andean cross is a stepped shape that some claim is inspired by the Southern Cross constellation and others believe represents the four quarters of the world. Whatever the case, Akapana’s builders planned with a sense of drama. They constructed its base walls with sandstone blocks, the array interrupted every ten feet by rectangular stone pillars that are easily ten feet tall. So massive are the pillars that the first European to see Tiwanaku, Pedro Cieza de León, later confessed himself unable to “understand or fathom what kind of instruments or tools were used to work them.” Rising from the center of a large moat, Akapana mimicked the surrounding mountains. A precisely engineered drainage system added to the similarity by channeling water from a cistern-like well at the summit down and along the sides, a stylized version of rainwater plashing down the Andes.
The Andean cross
(Illustration Credit 7.5)
Atop an adjacent, somewhat smaller structure, a large, walled enclosure called Kalasasaya, is the so-called Gateway of the Sun, cut from a single block of stone (now broken in two and reassembled). Covered with a fastidiously elaborate frieze, the twelve-foot gateway focuses the visitor’s eye on the image of a single deity whose figure projects from the lintel: the Staff God.
Today the Gateway of the Sun is the postcard emblem of Tiwanaku. During the winter solstice (June, in South America) hundreds of camera-toting European and American tourists wait on Kalasasaya through the entire freezing night for the sunrise, which is supposed to shine through the Gateway on that date alone. Guides in traditional costume explain that the reliefs on the lintel form an intricate astronomical calendar that may have been brought to earth by alien beings. To keep themselves warm during the inevitable longueurs, visitors sing songs of peace and harmony in several languages. Invariably the spectators are stunned when the first light of sunrise appears well to the side of the Gateway. Only afterward do they discover that the portal is not in its original location, and may have had nothing to do with astronomy or calendars.
If those tourists had come to Tiwanaku at its height, walking through the miles of raised fields surrounding it to the city’s carefully fitted stone walls, they would have been delighted by its splendor. But it might also have seemed curiously incomplete, with half the city falling down and in need of repairs and the other half under construction. Modern drawings of ancient cities tend to show them at an imagined apogee, the great monuments all splendidly arrayed together, perfect as architectural models. But this is not what Tiwanaku looked like, nor even what it was meant to look like, according to Isbell and Vranich. From the very beginning, the two men wrote in 2004, the city was partly in ruins—intentionally so, because the fallen walls bequeathed on Tiwanaku the authority of the past. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were constantly enveloped in construction projects, which testified to the continued wealth and vitality of the state. Sometimes these projects acquired construction materials by cannibalizing old monuments, thereby hastening the process of creating ruins. In the Andean tradition, labor was probably contributed by visiting work parties. Periodically ritual feasts that included much smashing of pottery interrupted the hubbub of construction. But it always continued. “They build their monuments as if their intent was never to finish them,” the Spanish academic Polo de Ondegardo marveled in 1571. Exactly right, Isbell and Vranich said. Completion was not the object. The goal was a constant buzz of purposeful activity.
As our hypothetical modern visitors wandered through the hurly-burly of construction and deconstruction, they might have felt that despite the commotion something was missing. Unlike Western cities, Tiwanaku had no markets—no bazaars full of shouting, bargaining, conniving entrepreneurs; no street displays of produce, pottery, and plonk; no jugglers and mimes trying to attract crowds; no pickpockets. In Africa, Asia, and Europe, Kolata wrote, “a city was a place of meeting and of melding for many different kinds of people.… Through trade and exchange, through buying and selling of every conceivable kind, the city was made and remade.” Tiwanaku was utterly different. Andean societies were based on the widespread exchange of goods and services, but kin and government, not market forces, directed the flow. The citizenry grew its own food and made its own clothes, or obtained them through their lineages, or picked them up in government warehouses. And the city, as Kolata put it, was a place for “symbolically concentrating the political and religious authority of the elite.” Other Andean cities, Wari among them, shared this quality. But Tiwanaku carried it to an extreme.
On Lake Titicaca, the reed boats known as totora are still in use, as they have been for two thousand years. This replica of a large totora was built in 2001 to prove the vessels could have hauled the big stones used in Tiwanaku’s walls.
(Illustration Credit 7.6)
The so-called Gateway of the Sun attracts pilgrims by the thousands who seek astronomical meaning in its location. Unfortunately, it was moved to its present site in the twentieth century.
(Illustration Credit 7.7)
Tiwanaku has been excavated for a century, and the more archaeologists delve into it the less there seems to be. To Vranich, the capital’s lack of resemblance to European imperial cities extends well beyond the absence of marketplaces. Far from being the powerful administrative center envisioned by earlier researchers, he says, Tiwanaku was a combination of the Vatican and Disneyland, a religious show capital with a relatively small population—almost a staff—that attracted pilgrims by the thousand. Like the tourists at the solstice today, visitors came to this empire of appearances to be dazzled and awed. “In the central city, buildings and monuments went up and down, up and down, at an incred
ible rate,” Vranich told me at Tiwanaku, where he had been working since 1996. “Nothing ever got finished completely, because they were just concerned with the facades. They had to keep changing the exhibits to keep the crowds coming.”
The encounter between Tiwanaku and Wari at Cerro Baúl seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. At any rate, a study of more than a thousand Wari and Tiwanaku graves found no evidence of the trauma associated with violence. Instead, the two societies split the region between them. Wari camped atop Cerro Baúl and a neighboring hillock, Cerro Mejía. Between them was a steep valley with Tiwanaku settlements scattered throughout. Because Wari and Tiwanaku pottery differed, Williams and Nash have been able to map which group lived in which neighborhood by the distribution of ceramic fragments. The Wari canal provided drinking water, but had to pass through Tiwanaku territory at the base of Cerro Baúl. Tiwanaku let the water through, but took enough to irrigate more than seven hundred acres of terraces.
At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other often, or had friendships across the political lines. Wari homes were furnished with Wari goods; Tiwanaku homes, Tiwanaku goods. Despite living next to each other, people continued to speak their different languages and wear their different clothing and look for inspiration and instruction from their different capitals. The social-science word for such intermingling without intermixing is “interdigitization.” For two centuries at Cerro Baúl, Wari and Tiwanaku were like people in parallel worlds, sharing the same time and space but implacably separate from each other. It is a small reminder that Indians were neither the peaceful, love-thy-neighbor types envisioned by some apologists or the brutal, ceaselessly aggressive warriors decried by some political critics.
The end came in about 800 A.D., Williams told me. He was part of a Peruvian-American team that in 2005 reconstructed Cerro Baúl’s last days. As many as twenty-eight high-ranking nobles and priests gathered in the Wari colony’s biggest palace for a final feast at a great reception hall, thirty feet on a side, each wall lined with a stone-faced bench. The chamber opened onto what the archaeologists believed “was likely the chief executive’s office for conducting statecraft,” the Andean equivalent of the Oval Office in the White House. To judge by the scattered food remains, the goodbye party was a Rabelaisian affair, with platters of llama, alpaca, vizcacha (Andean hare), and seven types of fish, all washed down with fresh chicha, this last being served in huge ceremonial mugs, many heraldically decorated, that held up to half a gallon apiece of brew. At the end the drunken crew staggered through the palace, smashing the crockery and setting the whole place afire. “It looks like they had a really wild time of it,” Williams said. Last to go was the chicha brewery with its elite female staff. The lords torched the thatched milling room and then threw their great mugs into the flames. “Later, when the embers had cooled,” archaeologists wrote, “six necklaces of shell and stone were placed atop the ashes in a final act of reverence.”
The retreat was part of a general fall. Tiwanaku may have declined first, leading Wari to shut down its embassy in Cerro Baúl. Or perhaps Wari was pulling back for its own internal reasons. Both declines have been laid to drought, but this is contested. For one thing, Wari had already survived drought. As for Tiwanaku, Vranich said, “How much would drought matter to Disneyland?” Its ability to retain its audience would be far more important.
The successors to both Wari and Tiwanaku combined the former’s organizational skills and the latter’s sense of design and razzle-dazzle. First came Chimor, then the greatest empire ever seen in Peru. Spread at its greatest extent over seven hundred miles of the coastline, Chimor was an ambitious state that grew maize and cotton by irrigating almost fifty thousand acres around the Moche River (all of modern Peru only reached that figure in 1960). A destructive El Niño episode in about 1100 A.D. made irrigation impossible for a while. In response, the government forced gangs of captive laborers to build a fifty-three-mile, masonry-lined canal to channel water from the Chicama River, in the next valley to the north, to farmland in the Moche Valley. The canal was a flop: some parts ran uphill, apparently because of incompetent engineering, and the rest lost nine-tenths of its water to evaporation and seepage. Some archaeologists believe that the canal was never meant to function. It was a PR exercise, they say, a Potemkin demonstration by the Chimor government that it was actively fighting El Niño.
When the bad weather ended, Chimor looked outside its borders. Armies went out and returned victorious to Chan Chan, the Chimor capital, a seaside metropolis with a dense center that covered four square miles. Dominated by nine high-walled imperial palace-tombs and five cathedral-like ceremonial complexes, the city was both exemplary in its grandeur and oddly empty, because its streets were restricted to the elite. Commoners were barred, except for a few specialized technicians and craftworkers. Each palace was hundreds of feet on a side and many were three stories tall. They were filled with storage space—living quarters were almost an afterthought. Their great beams adorned with splendidly worked gold and silver, the huge structures were jammed together around the center of town like people huddling in the shelter of an awning.
Chan Chan suffered a palace surfeit because dead rulers were regarded as divine figures. As with the Inka, the kings’ mummified bodies continued to live opulently in their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the mummies were necessary presences at important state occasions. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire the riches necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system almost guaranteed imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.
In this rare aerial photograph—taken in 1931, before modern looting blasted the site—the ruined Chimor capital of Chan Chan sprawls across the northern Peruvian coast. One of the wonders of the fifteenth-century world, Chan Chan abruptly fell to the Inka in about 1450; eighty years later, Spanish diseases and Spanish soldiers destroyed much of what had survived the Inka.
(Illustration Credit 7.8)
The biggest of Chan Chan’s surviving palaces may have belonged to Minchaçaman—the eleventh king in the Chimor dynasty, according to one Spanish account—who reputedly conquered much of the coastline. Minchaçaman was a powerful figure who could have taken over even more land than he did. Unfortunately for him, he lived at the same time that a previously little-known group, the Inka, acquired a new ruler, Pachakuti. In about 1450 the Inka army, led by Qhapaq Yupanki, Pachakuti’s brother, besieged the city-state of Cajamarca, in the foothills east of Chimor. Cajamarca’s leader had allied himself with Minchaçaman, who rushed to his aid with an army. He does not seem to have known what he was in for, possibly because he viewed the Inka as a gang of rustic thugs. Qhapaq Yupanki awaited him in an ambush. Minchaçaman and his army were forced to flee as Cajamarca fell to the Inka. Qhapaq Yupanki covered himself with so much glory that when he returned home to Qosqo his brother, sensing future trouble, promptly executed him.
A decade or so later—in 1463, if Spanish chronicles are correct—the emperor sent out another army led by his son and designated successor, Thupa Inka Yupanki. By that time nobody thought of the Inkas as hicks. Thupa Inka descended the Moche River and paralyzed Chimor’s defenses by the simple expedient of threatening to destroy its water supply. Minchaçaman was captured, taken to Qosqo, and forced to watch Thupa Inka’s victory celebration. Chimor’s conquerors were quick studies. Liking the courtly magnificence of Chan Chan, they hauled away what they could and, more important, forced the city’s gold, silver, and gem workers to accompany them to Qosqo. They were instructed to transform the city into a new Chan Chan, only more impressive. Seven decades later, when Pizarro held his victory celebration in Qosqo, it was equal in grandeur to any city in Europe.
MAKING THE WAK’A
Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer took me to Caballete, a narrow, dusty bowl, perhaps half a mile long and a quarter mile wide,
a few miles up the Fortaleza River from the Peruvian coast. At the mouth of the bowl were three mounds in a rough semicircle that faced a fourth mound. In front of one mound, like a one-eighth scale model of Stonehenge, was a ragged circle of wak’a: sacred stones. Not far from the wak’a looters had dug up an ancient graveyard, pulling out the bodies and unwinding them from their sheets in a search for gold and jewels. When they didn’t find any, they threw the bones down in disgust. In a square perhaps fifty yards on a side the ground was carpeted with broken human bones and scraps of thousand-year-old fabric.
We walked a little further and were greeted by a curious sight: skulls from the cemetery, gathered into several small piles. Around them were beer cans, cigarette butts, patent-medicine bottles, half-burned photographs, and candles shaped like naked women. These last had voodoo pins stuck in their heads and vaginas. Local people came to these places at night and either dug for treasure or practiced witchcraft, Haas said. In the harsh afternoon light they seemed to me tacky and sad. I imagined that the families of the people who had been buried at Caballete so long ago would have been outraged if they could have known what would happen to the bodies of their loved ones.