More travels around North Chile - Tiwanaku, the Bolivian Empire!

 
We went back to the awesome Santiago Museum of Pre-Colombine Art today - a fantastic museum with pieces from all over the Andean, and wider South and Central American, indigenous worlds. Definitely a place to visit if you come to Santiago. We went to this museum months ago when we first arrived in Santiago but, having traveled around some of the areas covered by the museum, and visited various sites and museums in those places, we decided to go back with a better understanding. This reminded us that we had been saving a post on Tiwanaku, a fantastic archaeological site that we visited up in Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca, back in February. So here it is. 

on the way to the temples - great weather!

Tiwanaku is believed to be the religious and ceremonial centre of a large pan-Andean empire preceding the Inca Empire centred on Cusco, Peru. Because it predates the Inca Empire, its sites and other material remains were partly destroyed by the Incas (or someone else), who in turn were almost wiped from the face of the earth by the Spanish conquistadores. So the Tiwanakan Empire is not well known, but the evidence that remains suggests that it covered a large geographical area (Bolivia, Peru, Northwestern Argentina, and North Chile - including San Pedro de Atacama), and achieved a level of civilisation as sophisticated as that of the Incas. The "Classical" and "Imperial" ages of the Tiwanakan civilisation date from around 374AD to 1200AD, with semi-urban occupation of this particular site from 1580BC. The rise of the Incas has recently been credited to llama pooh, which seems sensible.

As with the smaller San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, Tiwanaku was located on various caravan routes between highland and lowland areas - as well as sitting at the centre of a trading network its proximity to the huge Lake Titicaca gave it access to key resources. There is evidence at the site of advanced irrigation methods which enabled the occupants to grow agricultural surpluses.   

We're pleased to report also that again we had amazing weather, a little cold - we were at almost 4,000 metres above sea level - but with bright sunshine virtually all day.

Before we go into the archaeology, some modern context. It's fair to say that Bolivia as a country has on the whole struggled in post-colonial times. Stuck between Chile, a booming nation which can trace much of its modern economic success to defeating Bolivia (and Peru) in the War of the Pacific, and Peru which, while still poor, has a much larger share of the tourism market than Bolivia, due largely to the world-famous Machu Picchu. Now landlocked and poor, there is no obvious route to economic development for Bolivia, though it has certainly had some success with social development, providing an example to other post-colonial governments on how to treat indigenous people fairly.   

Because the Inca Empire was at its height when Europeans arrived in South America, the Incas have always been in the European consciousness, and their civilisation is an ancient highly cultured one associated with Peru. The Tiwanaku civilisation was only re-discovered later, and it's a source of irritation to some Bolivians that the South American civilisation that springs to mind, to a European or North-American, is the Inca. The Bolivian President Evo Morales was invested with his powers at Tiwanaku in a ceremony partly based on Aymaran rituals (give the video a couple of minutes as it gives some good views of the site). This was undoubtedly a political move charged with symbolism, Señor Morales wants to be seen as a man of the people, but also a show designed to boost the pride of the Bolivian nation - their ancestors once ruled an empire over their neighbours, and formed the basis of later cultures.  

view towards the village near the site

Tiwanakan, and modern Andean (Aymaran), religious beliefs are based around man's interaction with three worlds:

Alaxpacha - the sky or heavens, represented in Tiwanakan iconography by the Condor;

Akapacha - the earth, represented by the Jaguar; 

Mankepacha - the underworld, represented by the Snake.

Those places sound familiar, nobody in the world is all that different from anyone else in what they believe when you get down to basics. Sorry, no pics (the museum didn't allow it), but the iconography of these three sacred beasts appears all over Tiwanakan monumental architecture, statues, and ceramics (like the Jaguar pot linked to above from the museum collection in Santiago). 

The Tiwanakans represented these worlds literally, by building three main temples at their religious centre: firstly the Subterranean Temple, a sunken structure - the temple of the underworld.

it contains these spooky faces - maybe ancestors

a temple for honouring the dead

from inside the temple of the underworld

Then the temple of earth, representing the earthly plane, our world. This is the largest of the three main temples, where Pachamama (Mother Earth) was worshipped.

The temple has two main entrances: this at one end is the solstice gate - certainly part of the function of this temple was as a ceremonial and agricultural calendar.

the monumental exterior wall of the temple of the earth

advanced construction techniques - metal "keys" were placed in those grooves to anchor the wall stones

the Spanish tried to destroy this guy but had to settle for scratching a cross on his shoulder - if you click and expand you can see the carved Tiwanakan patterns

this guy is part of the evidence for the geographical extent of the Tiwanakan Empire - an equivalent statue has apparently been found on the coast north of Arica in Northern Chile

the Sun Gate - with a person giving an idea of scale

the Stargate inside the museum

While we're at the Star Gate, given the elements of popular culture that name evokes, we should note that Tiwanaku has attracted its fair share of alien civilisation theorists - in the mould of the great Erich Von Daniken, the archaeologist who was at the forefront of claiming alien origins for human civilisation and intelligence, linking together everything from the Nasca Lines in Peru to the Egyptian Pyramids as evidence of ancient contact with alien civilisations (which was the plot of the film "Stargate"). His books are a fantastic read in that they bring together many curiosities of the ancient world - just in a selective manner which undermines his theories.

Anyway, in the musuem at Tiwanaku is a series of extended skulls, of the type that get UFO theorists very excited. We didn't get any photos as photography was prohibited in the museum, but there's some on that link above. Unfortunately there's a far simpler explanation than these extended "cone-head" skulls being aliens: that it's possible, by binding a child's skull from a young age, to cause the skull to grow upwards like a cone. As inconceivable as that sounds (who would mutilate a child?), members of elite castes such as royalty or aristocracy have always of course been identifiable from birth (because membership of the caste is defined by the identity of one's parents) so the process could be started early. It seems that for various ancient peoples these extended heads were a way of distinguishing elites (by birth) from ordinary people, such as in Pharaonic Egypt (this link gives some great examples but is a bit silly - it even goes all David Icke at the end). It's not even that bizarre or particularly cruel when you think about other examples of "civilised" body mutilation, like Chinese feet binding. Nowadays the sacrifice required from the most privileged (in an aristocratic sense) in our society is endless grinning and waving.       

Back to the temple of the earth...

Detail of the Sun Gate

The photo above was a fantastic moment when our guide demonstrated the stone "amplifier" inside the temple of the earth. You can see him behind the wall, he's speaking into the hole in the stone, which was specially cut to amplify the voice to enable everyone to hear - the temple itself is huge, so this is a really clever piece of ancient engineering.

Now the temple of the sky, basically a large mound, partially reconstructed to show how it would have looked - like the sort of stepped pyramid that we're all familiar with from various images of South/ Central American civilisations. 

right hand corner

standing stones on top of the temple of the sky

On top of the mound is a sunken pit which, although it's not clear today, has through excavation been shown to be in the shape of a large Andean cross.

It's not known if this is definitely the case, but it's believed that the pit would have been full of water - at night it would have reflected the stars. The Andean cross finds its mirror in the night sky in the southern hemisphere - there's no pole star down here, instead stargazers navigate using the Southern Cross. 

our Andean Cross shaped joss stick holder thing

The Andean cross itself has, as you can see above, three steps all the way round, representing the three worlds, or levels, of the Andean real and spirit worlds. It's an evocative symbol. If you search around for links to discussions or descriptions of the Andean cross you'll find lots of stuff relating to Peru and the Incas. But this iconography and belief system was around long before the Incas, who inherited it from the Tiwanaku culture, which used its power and wealth to build this site with temples on a grand scale to give awe inspiring realisation to a belief system that was pan-Andean and truly indigenous, and probably ancient even by the time Tiwanaku became powerful. The Andean cross and the three worlds are no more solely Inca beliefs than the concept of an all powerful monotheistic deity is solely the creed of today's Roman Catholic Church, itself originally arising from the power of an ancient military empire. 

That's Tiwanaku, an incredible place and a must-see in Bolivia. And, we almost forgot, you get to eat lovely salmon there, fresh from Lake Titicaca!

some more views across to the modern village

chao!