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By Root 1984 0

that the area is very cold. “Bring warm clothing,” Williams advised me in Cerro Baúl. “You’re going to freeze.” The warnings puzzled me, because Lake Titicaca, which is big enough to stay at a near-constant 51 degrees Fahrenheit, moderates the local climate (this is one reason why agriculture is possible at such height). On winter nights the average temperature is a degree below freezing—cold, but not any colder than New England, and considerably warmer than one would expect at 12,600 feet. Only when I traveled there did I realize that this was the temperature indoors. The modern town of Tiwanaku is a poor place and few of its buildings have any heating. One night there I attended a performance at a family circus that was touring the Andes. It was so cold inside the tent that for the first few minutes the audience was shrouded in a cloud of its own breath. My host that night was an American archaeologist. When I woke the next morning in her spare bedroom, my host, in parka, hat, and gloves, was melting water on her stove. The cold does not detract from the area’s beauty: Tiwanaku sits in the middle of a plain ringed by ice-capped mountains. From the ruin’s taller buildings the great lake, almost ten miles to the northwest, is just visible. The wide expanse of water seems to merge into the sky without a welt.

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,