New age for an ancient culture.

• Author: Tennant, Anne
• Position: Tiwanaku culture

WHEN THE SPANISH conquered the Inca Empire in the sixteenth century, they found the city of Tiwanaku, located in the Bolivian highlands near Lake Titicaca, in ruins. However, at its apogee about A.D. 800, the sight was a different one indeed--a huge urbanization of perhaps forty thousand people covering over two square miles. The city featured palaces, terraced pyramids, and sunken courts constructed of precisely cut stone blocks, and decorated with magnificent sculptures of deities and rulers.

With the ravages of time and the lack of a written language, nearly all knowledge of the Tiwanaku civilization disappeared, (the names of the rulers do not even appear in local legends). Archaeological research in the twentieth century has begun to reveal Tiwanaku's story, though only a small fraction of the site has been excavated to date. The city's monumental core, surrounded by a moat, is now believed to have been constructed over a period of seven hundred years between A.D. 300 and 1000. Tiwanaku's inhabitants coaxed an abundant, stable food supply from their starkly beautiful but harsh mountain environment, using sophisticated hydraulic technology and extremely productive raised-field agriculture. This in turn permitted the platform of population growth, social stratification, and occupational specialization upon which a city state could be built. Tiwanaku's cultural prestige was felt throughout a wide region, including present-day southern Peru, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina.

In the late fifteenth century, the Inca armies added the Titicaca basin to their expand mg empire. At the time of their arrival, the metropolis had been abandoned for several hundred years. Always alert to profitable borrowings from other cultures, the Inca were quick to appropriate earlier Tiwanaku traditions in developing their superb stonework, fine weavings, and art styles. Long-enduring religious beliefs provided the Inca Empire with compelling religious iconography, pilgrimage shrines, and a powerful origin myth, all of which served well to support the state apparatus.

Despite its fame as one of...