Thursday, October 4, 2012

Tiwanaku Seduces





Tiwanaku is important not just because it became the center of a large populous state in the Alto Plano that built with cut stone over an apparent two thousand year history, but it is also the location of extraordinary cut monolithic fitted stones made from andesite hardness 8 and the use of concrete as well.

The only civilization able to do this in human prehistory as we understand it was the Egyptians when they built the Great Pyramid in 2400 BC. Even then the quality of work shown was over the top. We could accomplish the same today, but with huge steel handling beds and perhaps jet cutting tools. Bronze saws with an Emory sand abrasive would find it challenging.

Measurement appears to conform to Egyptian standards though so a high standard could well have been available.

Besides, the Alto Plano was one region particularly important to the Atlantean Bronze Age global trading enterprises because it had both tin and copper. Thus encouraging a large local settlement was sensible.

I would like to see someone get in there able to address the machining issue. I see a world of straight edges and no curves at all. This works for monuments and fitted structure. Yet drilling must be in evidence.

It is also here that we have evidence that the Alto Plano was originally at sea level. This certainly would allow the effective transport of the andesite from forty miles away. Of course all specialists have rejected that proposition by mostly ignoring it.

However, a natural corollary of the Pleistocene nonconformity in which the crust shifted southward thirty degrees initiated with a comet impact on the North Pole some 12900 years ago is that compression and subsidence occurred along the movement arc were it crossed the equator. In the Western Hemisphere this means that the Andes were thrust up an additional five miles and that the Gulf of Mexico also subsided mostly submerging the mountain range of Cuba.

For that reason, the one place on Earth that it may be possible to locate advanced technology of any kind from before the crustal shift is just where it credibly has been found. Thus the Alto Plano calls for a full press archeological investigation with plenty of fresh eyes. Those incredible shaped monster leggo blocks are not the only out of place artifacts.



Tiwanaku, (SpanishTiahuanaco and Tiahuanacu) is an important Pre-Columbian archaeological site in western Bolivia, South America. Tiwanaku is recognized by Andean scholars as one of the most important precursors to the Inca Empire, flourishing as the ritual and administrative capital of a major state power for approximately five hundred years. The ruins of the ancient city state are near the south-eastern shore of Lake Titicaca in the La Paz DepartmentIngavi ProvinceTiwanaku Municipality, about 72 km (45 mi) west of La Paz. The site was first recorded in written history by Spanish conquistador and self-acclaimed "first chronicler of the Indies" Pedro Cieza de León. Leon stumbled upon the remains of Tiwanaku in 1549 while searching for the Inca capital Qullasuyu.[1] Some have hypothesized that Tiwanaku's modern name is related to the Aymara term taypiqala, meaning "stone in the center", alluding to the belief that it lay at the center of the world.[2] However, the name by which Tiwanaku was known to its inhabitants may have been lost, as the people of Tiwanaku had no written language.[3][4]




The area around Tiwanaku may have been inhabited as early as 1500 BC as a small agriculturally based village.[5] Most research, though, is based around the Tiwanaku IV and V periods between AD 300 and AD 1000, during which Tiwanaku grew significantly in power. During the time period between 300 BC and AD 300 Tiwanaku is thought to have been a moral and cosmological center to which many people made pilgrimages. The ideas of cosmological prestige are the precursors to Tiwanaku's powerful empire.[1] In 1945, Arthur Posnansky[6] estimated that Tiwanaku dated to 15,000 BC using archaeoastronomical techniques. Later, as a result of the reevaluation of the techniques that Posnansky used to estimate the age of Tiwanaku, expert archaeoastronomical archaeologists concluded that they were invalid as they were a "sorry example of misused archaeoastronomical evidence."[7]


Tiwanaku's location between the lake and dry highlands provided key resources of fish, wild birds, plants, and herding grounds for camelidae, particularlyllamas.[8] The Titicaca Basin is the most productive environment in the area with predictable and abundant rainfall, which the Tiwanaku culture learned to harness and use in their farming. As one goes further east, the Altiplano is an area of very dry arid land.[1] The high altitude Titicaca Basin required the development of a distinctive farming technique known as "flooded-raised field" agriculture (suka kollus). They comprised a significant percentage of the agriculture in the region, along with irrigated fields, pasture, terraced fields and qochas (artificial ponds)[1] farming. Artificially raised planting mounds are separated by shallow canals filled with water. The canals supply moisture for growing crops, but they also absorb heat from solar radiation during the day. This heat is gradually emitted during the bitterly cold nights that often produce frost, endemic to the region, providing thermal insulation. Traces of landscape management were also found in the Llanos de Moxos region (Amazonian food plains of the Moxos).[9] Over time, the canals also were used to farm edible fish, and the resulting canal sludge was dredged for fertilizer. The fields grew to cover nearly the entire surface of the lake[citation needed]and although they were not uniform in size or shape, all had the same primary function.[9]


Though labor-intensive, suka kollus produce impressive yields. While traditional agriculture in the region typically yields 2.4 metric tons of potatoes per hectare, and modern agriculture (with artificial fertilizers and pesticides) yields about 14.5 metric tons per hectare, suka kollu agriculture yields an average of 21 tons per hectare.[1]
Significantly, the experimental fields recreated in the 1980s by University of Chicago´s Alan Kolata and Oswaldo Rivera[10] suffered only a 10% decrease in production following a 1988 freeze that killed 70-90% of the rest of the region's production. This kind of protection against killing frosts in an agrarian civilization is an invaluable asset. For these reasons, the importance of suka kollus cannot be overstated.
As the population grew, occupational niches were created where each member of the society knew how to do their job and relied on the elites of the empire to provide all of the commoners with all the resources that would fulfill their needs. Some occupations include agriculturists, herders, pastoralists, etc. Along with this separation of occupations, there was also a hierarchal stratification within the empire.[11] The elites of Tiwanaku lived inside four walls that were surrounded by a moat. This moat, some believe, was to create the image of a sacred island. Inside the walls there were many images of human origin that only the elites were privileged to, despite the fact that images represent the beginning of all humans not only the elite. Commoners may have only ever entered this structure for ceremonial purposes since it was home to the holiest of shrines.[1]


Rise and fall of Tiwanaku


The city and its inhabitants left no written history, and modern local people know little about the city and its activities. An archaeologically based theory asserts that around AD 400, Tiwanaku went from being a locally dominant force to a predatory state. Tiwanaku expanded its reaches into the Yungas and brought its culture and way of life to many other cultures in PeruBolivia, andChile. However, Tiwanaku was not exclusively a violent culture. In order to expand its reach, Tiwanaku used politics to create colonies, negotiate trade agreements (which made the other cultures rather dependent), and establish state cults.[12] Many others were drawn into the Tiwanaku empire due to religious beliefs as Tiwanaku never ceased being a religious center. Force was rarely necessary for the empire to expand, but on the northern end of the Basin resistance was present. There is evidence that bases of some statues were taken from other cultures and carried all the way back to the capital city of Tiwanaku where the stones were placed in a subordinate position to the Gods of the Tiwanaku in order to display the power Tiwanaku held over many.[13]


Among the times that Tiwanaku expressed violence were dedications made on top of a building known as the Akipana. Here people were disemboweled and torn apart shortly after death and laid out for all to see. It is speculated that this ritual was a form of dedication to the gods. Research showed that one man who was dedicated was not a native to the Titicaca Basin, leaving room to think that dedications were most likely not of people originally within the society.[1]


The community grew to urban proportions between AD 600 and AD 800, becoming an important regional power in the southern Andes. According to early estimates, at its maximum extent, the city covered approximately 6.5 square kilometers, and had between 15,000–30,000 inhabitants.[1] However, satellite imaging was used recently to map the extent of fossilized suka kollus across the three primary valleys of Tiwanaku, arriving at population-carrying capacity estimates of anywhere between 285,000 and 1,482,000 people.[10]


The empire continued to grow, absorbing cultures rather than eradicating them. William H. Isbell states that "Tiahuanaco underwent a dramatic transformation between AD 600 and AD 700 that established new monumental standards for civic architecture and greatly increased the resident population." [14] Archaeologists note a dramatic adoption of Tiwanaku ceramics in the cultures who became part of the Tiwanaku empire. Tiwanaku gained its power through the trade it implemented between all of the cities within its empire.[12] The elites gained their status by control of the surplus of food obtained from all regions and redistributed among all the people. Control of llama herds became very significant to Tiwanaku, as they were essential for carrying goods back and forth between the center and the periphery. The animals may also have symbolized the distance between the commoners and the elites.


The elites' power continued to grow along with the surplus of resources until about AD 950. At this time a dramatic shift in climate occurred,[1] as is typical for the region.[15][16] A significant drop in precipitation occurred in the Titicaca Basin, with some archaeologists venturing to suggest a great drought. As the rain became less and less many of the cities furthest away from Lake Titicaca began to produce fewer crops to give to the elites. As the surplus of food dropped, the elites' power began to fall. Due to the resiliency of the raised fields, the capital city became the last place of production, but in the end even the intelligent design of the fields was no match for the weather. Tiwanaku disappeared around AD 1000 because food production, the empire's source of power and authority, dried up. The land was not inhabited again for many years.[1] In isolated places, some remnants of the Tiwanaku people, like the Uros, may have survived until today.


Beyond the northern frontier of the Tiwanaku state a new power started to emerge in the beginning of the 13th century, the Inca Empire.


In AD 1445 Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (the ninth Inca) began conquest of the Titicaca regions. He incorporated and developed what was left from the Tiwanaku patterns of culture, and the Inca officials were superimposed upon the existing local officials. Quechua was made the official language and sun worship the official religion. So, the last traces of the Tiwanaku civilization were 

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