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By Root 1917 0

turned up so few clean floors and surfaces, Isbell and Vranich wrote, “that it is apparent that Wari people experienced domestic refuse as benign and unthreatening”). Apparently the walls ringing and crisscrossing the city were intended for privacy, not protection; Wari was not located in an easily defended spot. Along the spine of the Andes the empire set up a string of a dozen administrative centers that were like smaller versions of the capital. These were not built with defense in mind, either. Indeed, there is little record of Wari warfare. Its supremacy was commercial and intellectual; it was based less on infantry troops than on innovative technology. All of which may explain some of its behavior in Cerro Baúl.

Wari emissaries arrived in Moquegua around 600 A.D., according to Patrick Ryan Williams and Donna V. Nash, Field Museum archaeologists who have been working there since the early 1990s. A simpler culture had already staked out the best farmland in the area. The Wari neither aggressively threw them out nor withdrew in dismay. Guided, one imagines, by instructions from headquarters, they quickly set up living quarters on Cerro Baúl itself. The big mesa is to this day regarded as an apu, an ancient spirit transfigured into rock. Thus putting a city directly on top of it was an arresting statement: Here we are.

On a practical level, living on a five-hundred-yard-long mesa was a daunting task. To supply water, the Wari carved a fifteen-mile canal through the mountains from the peaks to the bottom of Cerro Baúl, an engineering feat that would be a challenge today. “And even that got water only to the bottom of the hill,” Williams told me. “After that, it was bucket brigades.” As I huffed and puffed on the wickedly steep, thirty-minute hike to the summit, he invited me to imagine a continuous line of servants exchanging ceramic jugs (slopping, brimful ones going up; light, empty ones going down) along the path, working day in and day out to provide water for the priests and princes above.

Small, rudely fashioned models of farmhouses and farmyards covered the top of the butte. Most of the models simply outlined walls, fences, and doors with loose stones, but some were elaborate constructions complete with plastic model cars, toy animals, and thatch roofs. People were climbing Cerro Baúl, building their maquettes, and praying that the heavens would give them the real-life equivalents. The miniature farms extended for hundreds of yards in all directions. Here and there, makeshift crosses and pictures of saints added a veneer of Catholicism to indigenous Andean belief. Some of the ruined Wari walls were covered with ruined model walls. “This is getting out of hand,” Williams said. “I don’t want to knock down somebody’s dream house to get to an archaeological site.”

WARI AND TIWANAKU, 700 A.D.

In about 750 A.D., about a century after Wari came to Cerro Baúl, Tiwanaku groups infiltrated the region around it. In most places on earth, this encounter would have been fraught with tension. And perhaps if Tiwanaku had been more like Wari there would have been immediate war. But Tiwanaku was so different in so many ways that ordinary expectations rarely apply to it. The celebrated anthropologist Clifford Geertz has half-jokingly suggested that all states can be parceled into four types: pluralist, in which the state is seen by its people as having moral legitimacy; populist, in which government is viewed as an expression of the people’s will; “great beast,” in which the rulers’ power depends on using force to keep the populace cowed; and “great fraud,” in which the elite uses smoke and mirrors to convince the people of its inherent authority. Every state is a mix of all of these elements, but in Tiwanaku, the proportion of “great fraud” may have been especially high. Nonetheless, Tiwanaku endured for many centuries.

Tiwanaku’s capital, Tiwanaku city, was at the southwest end of Lake Titicaca. Situated at 12,600 feet, it was the highest city in the ancient world. Today visitors from lower altitudes are constantly warned