Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
out by the Spanish crown in the same way as for mining, and many of the great stones were
dragged away to build churches and houses. Still more were destroyed with
dynamite
at
the beginning of the twentieth century to provide gravel for the foundations of the railway
that passes nearby, while early archeological excavations varied little in nature from the loot-
ing of the Spaniards, stripping the site of its most beautiful statues to adorn the museums
of Europe and the US. After years of neglect and deterioration due to dampness, moss and
lichen, moreover, the Bolivian government recently appealed to
UNESCO
for financial help
and decided to initiate criminal proceedings against officials in charge of a previous restora-
tion.
The museums
Adjacent to the site entrance are two
museums
, access to both of which is included in the
ticket price; it is projected that much of the aforementioned financial help will be invested in
the restoration of their contents.
The
Museo Regional Arqueológico de Tiwanaku
houses some of the site's best carved
stone idols and friezes, and there's a big collection of ceramics, themselves the main means
used to distinguish between the different eras in Tiwanaku civilization. The earliest pottery,
from between about 1000 and 300 BC - a period known as the Village Stage or Tiwanaku I -
consistsmainlyofsimplebutwell-madepots,decoratedwithgeometricincisionsanddesigns
(including puma and bird motifs) painted in red, white and yellow on a chestnut-brown back-
ground. Ceramics from the period known as the Urban Stage - Tiwanaku II, from about the
first century AD - show a clear advance in quality and design, with finely made pots richly
painted with multiple colours and highly burnished. Through the periods III to IV, up to the
end of the first millennium AD, the pots become ever more elaborate and iconographically
distinctive, with highly stylized feline and serpentine figures. Some are decorated with dis-
tinctive human faces that make it easy to believe the local Aymara when they claim to be
directly descended from the builders of Tiwanaku.
The
Museo Lítico
, a rather forlorn annexe, houses a solitary if huge exhibit, the 7.3m-high
Bennett monolith, or Pachamama, relocated from Miraflores a decade ago.
Akapana
As you enter the ruins, the big mound on your right is
Akapana
, a great earth pyramid with
seven terraced platforms faced with stone. This was the biggest structure in the complex,
measuring about 180m by 140m, and some 18m tall, and is thought to have been the city's
most important religious centre, constructed as an imitation of a sacred mountain. From the
west it now looks more like a hill than a man-made feature, and in fact archeologists ori-
ginally believed it had been built around a natural hill. You can still make out the pyramid's
seven tiers, however, and some of the huge stone blocks are still in evidence on the east side,
many of them carved with a step motif characteristic of Tiwanaku.
