Tiahuanaco lies near the eastern margin of Lake Titicaca on the Bolivian altiplano. The area is the focus of a great many native legends.
The Inca capital Cuzco, for example, was supposed to have been established by the semi-mythic Children of the Sun who had been created and educated at Titicaca. The legendary founder of the Inca royal line, Manco Capac, was believed to be a Son of the Sun. He was given a golden wand with which to find his way and emerged from a subterranean passageway to discover he was at Lake Titicaca.
The lake was also believed to have been the home of the Creator of All, Viracocha, who lived at Tiahuanaco.
The group of Spanish conquistadors who first stumbled on the ruins faced large open spaces bounded by vertical stone walls, some carved as huge single pieces with sharp right angles. A high pyramidal mound stood opposite a semisubterranean depression, the spaces punctuated by standing human figures cut in single square-sectioned blocks of stone incised with delicate patterns.
There were several free-standing gateways. A large, low enclosed platform is the site of one the finest of these, the Gate of the Sun. On it, carved reliefs of a frontal figure stands on a stepped mountain and holds serpent staffs. He wears a sunburst head-dress and around him winged human and bird-headed figures kneel on one leg. Beneath him are 12 disembodied heads, also with radial head-dresses, linked together by a celestial serpent with multiple heads.
At the centre of a subterranean temple stood a 22 foot high stele that showed a figure in head-dress carrying a large beaker in one hand and a strombus shell in the other.
More recent visits by archaeologists have defined six architectural complexes, all probably used for religious ceremonies.
The most important structure, the Kalasasaya platform on which the Gate of the Sun stands, is near the centre of the site. The subterranean temple lies to the east, and the enclosures of Putuni, Laka Kollu, and Q'eri Kala are on the west.
Still farther west, near the lake, is a sizeable cemetrey. Recent evidence suggests that the site may have been much larger than the part which remains visible today and thus have had a sizeable resident population.
Experts tell us confidently that Tiahuanaco was occupied from about 100 a.d. to perhaps 1000 a.d., but stop short of telling us when it was built.
Alan Landsburg, who visited the site in the early 1970s, penned the following description of what he saw:
The walls were put together from megaliths - titanic many-sided stones, accurately cut and ground to a smooth finish, then fitted so precisely that no mortar is needed to bind them. There are no chinks in the walls. I couldn't even pound a chisel between the rocks.
I measured a medium sized block. It was twenty feet by ten by three. This figured out at around fifty tons ... for it was hard Andean granite like most of the blocks ...Each block in these walls is notched so that it interlocks tightly with the stone underneath it, as well as with its neighbours on each side.
One problem, as Landsburg pointed out, was how these structures were built.
Tiahuanaco stands at an altitude of 13,125 feet above sea level. While some of the blocks used were of local sandstone, most of them are andesite, the hardest material available in the region. The andesite quarries are some fifty miles away (as the crow flies) on the slopes of the extinct volcano, Kayappia.
Landsburg's estimate of 50 tons is, if anything, conservative. Worked blocks weighing up to 65 tons have been found.
How they were worked is difficult to say. Modern steel tools blunt quickly on this type of rock. Copper was definitely in use in ancient Mesoamerica, but copper tools would be far too soft to do the job.
Some commentators have suggested the use of bronze, although this would require a technology sufficiently advanced to extract tin from the raw ore. There is evidence of prehistoric tin workings in the Cordilleras, some 90 miles from Tiahuanaco. These have not been accurately dated, but appear to be far older than the earliest assigned dates for Tiahuanaco. They lay hidden for millennia beneath a glacier that only retreated in the 1940s.
If bronze tools were used, they must have been made from bronze hardened in some way no longer known to us - and unknown to either Incas or Olmecs to judge from the artefacts that have survived from these cultures.
Since there are no chisel marks on the stones, it may be that the builders of Tiahuanaco used some other method entirely. If so, this technology too has been lost to us.
Transportation of the blocks presents another mystery. The horse was only introduced into South America with the coming of the Spaniards. The wheel, while not quite unknown, was used only on toys. So these massive blocks seem to have been dragged by human muscle over a distance in excess of 50 miles to a height in excess of 13,000 feet.
Even the local sandstone was not all that local. It was quarried on the western shore of the lake about ten miles from the site and broken portions of gigantic blocks weigh up to 100 tons. The assumption is that the original unbroken blocks must have weighed anything up to 400 tons.
These too were apparently manhandled to a site a mile south-west of the principal ruins.
If the shaping and transportation of the blocks involved techniques, tools or equipment now unknown, the building of the city presents even more serious problems for the archaeologist.
The notches in the blocks mentioned by Landsburg enable them to be set together in a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with each unit interlocking with those above, below and beside it like Lego bricks. The result is a construction of exceptional stability, perhaps designed to withstand earthquakes.
But while Lego bricks are child's play to use, Lego bricks weighing between 50 and 400 tons present engineering problems we could only solve today through the use of heavy machinery. What solution did the builders of Tiahuanaco find?
It is difficult to imagine teams of workmen on this site whatever techniques were used. The thin mountain air makes exertion difficult and the whole region is so barren, one wonders how they might have been fed.
Tiahuanaco is a port.
Its designers incorporated harbours, quays and docks in its construction. This port is 13,000 feet above sea level and miles from the nearest water.
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