Tiwanaku: Sacred Architecture of the Andes and the Gateway of the Sun
Tiwanaku (or Tiahuanaco) — built on the Bolivian altiplano at 3,840 meters above sea level, on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca — was the capital of one of the most powerful and far-reaching civilizations of pre-Columbian South America. Between approximately 500 and 1000 CE, Tiwanaku exerted religious, cultural, and economic influence across a vast area of the Andes, from what is now southern Peru to northern Chile and Argentina. Its architecture — the Gateway of the Sun, the Akapana pyramid, the Kalasasaya ritual court, the massive stone monoliths — was built with a technical precision that has astonished archaeologists: massive stones transported from quarries 90 kilometers away, fitted together without mortar to tolerances of less than a millimeter, some blocks connected by bronze I-shaped clamps melted and poured directly into grooves cut in the stone. The city was the cosmological center of its world, its architecture a three-dimensional image of the sacred geography of the And...