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By Root 2039 0

every conceivable kind, the city was made and remade.” Tiwanaku was utterly different. Andean societies were based on the widespread exchange of goods and services, but kin and government, not market forces, directed the flow. The citizenry grew its own food and made its own clothes, or obtained them through their lineages, or picked them up in government warehouses. And the city, as Kolata put it, was a place for “symbolically concentrating the political and religious authority of the elite.” Other Andean cities, Wari among them, shared this quality. But Tiwanaku carried it to an extreme.

On Lake Titicaca, the reed boats known as totora are still in use, as they have been for two thousand years. This replica of a large totora was built in 2001 to prove the vessels could have hauled the big stones used in Tiwanaku’s walls.

The so-called Gateway of the Sun attracts pilgrims by the thousands who seek astronomical meaning in its location. Unfortunately, it was moved to its present site in the twentieth century.

Tiwanaku has been excavated for a century, and the more archaeologists delve into it the less there seems to be. To Vranich, the capital’s lack of resemblance to European imperial cities extends well beyond the absence of marketplaces. Far from being the powerful administrative center envisioned by earlier researchers, he says, Tiwanaku was a combination of the Vatican and Disneyland, a religious show capital with a relatively small population—almost a staff— that attracted pilgrims by the thousand. Like the tourists at the solstice today, visitors came to this empire of appearances to be dazzled and awed. “In the central city, buildings and monuments went up and down, up and down, at an incredible rate,” Vranich told me at Tiwanaku, where he had been working since 1996. “Nothing ever got finished completely, because they were just concerned with the facades. They had to keep changing the exhibits to keep the crowds coming.”

The encounter between Tiwanaku and Wari at Cerro Baúl seems to have gone remarkably smoothly. At any rate, a study of more than a thousand Wari and Tiwanaku graves found no evidence of the trauma associated with violence. Instead, the two societies split the region between them. Wari camped atop Cerro Baúl and a neighboring hillock, Cerro Mejía. Between them was a steep valley with Tiwanaku settlements scattered throughout. Because Wari and Tiwanaku pottery differed, Williams and Nash have been able to map which group lived in which neighborhood by the distribution of ceramic fragments. The Wari canal provided drinking water, but had to pass through Tiwanaku territory at the base of Cerro Baúl. Tiwanaku let the water through, but took enough to irrigate more than seven hundred acres of terraces.

At the same time, Wari and Tiwanaku kept themselves separate. Although they shared resources, there is little evidence that people from one culture visited the other often, or had friendships across the political lines. Wari homes were furnished with Wari goods; Tiwanaku homes, Tiwanaku goods. Despite living next to each other, people continued to speak their different languages and wear their different clothing and look for inspiration and instruction from their different capitals. The social-science word for such intermingling without intermixing is “interdigitization.” For two centuries at Cerro Baúl, Wari and Tiwanaku were like people in parallel worlds, sharing the same time and space but implacably separate from each other. It is a small reminder that Indians were neither the peaceful, love-thy-neighbor types envisioned by some apologists or the brutal, ceaselessly aggressive warriors decried by some political critics.

The end came in about 800 A.D., Williams told me. He was part of a Peruvian-American team that in 2005 reconstructed Cerro Baúl’s last days. As many as twenty-eight high-ranking nobles and priests gathered in the Wari colony’s biggest palace for a final feast at a great reception hall, thirty feet on a side, each wall lined with a stone-faced bench. The chamber opened