The prehistoric city of Tiwanaku, on the southern shore of Bolivia’s famous Lake Titicaca, was abandoned around 1000 AD, some 400 years before the Inca established their Andean empire. The heyday of this city was between A.D. 500 and 950, during which religious artifacts from the city spread across the southern Andes, but when the conquering Inka arrived in the mid-fifteenth century, the site had been mysteriously abandoned for half a millennium. Even after its abandonment, Tiwanaku continued to be an important religious site for the local people and the Inka Empire, and it is still an integral part of the religious lives of Andean people in the turbulent present of modern Bolivia. Its monumental ruins have often been compared to Stonehenge in that no one knows how an ancient civilization could have made them.

With its courtyards and terraced monuments, the main city of Tiwanaku was once suspected to be an uninhabited ceremonial center, visited only by its elite pre-Incan rulers. Tiwanakans, it was thought, used the buildings at the city center for festivals, ancestor worship, astronomical observations, and sacrifice. Mysterious religious symbols adorning the entrances to these main buildings fed credence to this theory.

When an archeological dig revealed an extensive grid of houses surrounding the center, it challenged the previous view by clearly suggesting that a very large population once lived there. In fact, at its height, Tiwanaku may have boasted a population of over 300,000, including both those who lived in the main city and in nearby farmlands.

Dr. Alexei Vranich has been excavating the ruins since 1995. What is so amazing is that only about 5% of the ruins have been excavated. Alexei will continue to work in Tiwanaku, attempting to uncover the mysteries that are still guarded by the majestic stones and monoliths.

 

Tiwanaku

The mysterious stonework in the ruins of Tiwanaku.

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