Tiwanaku

Tiwanaku was a major Andean polity and culture centred on the southern shore of Lake Titicaca, on the high Bolivian Altiplano, and was one of the most important civilisations of pre-Columbian South America, a precursor and partial contemporary of the Wari.

It is best described as a state and culture rather than a centralised territorial empire in the classic sense, and scholars debate whether it exercised direct political control or expanded chiefly through religious prestige, trade, and colonisation. The Tiwanaku polity rose to prominence around 550 to 600 CE, though the site itself had been settled far earlier, from the Formative period centuries before. Its capital, the city of Tiwanaku, lay at an altitude of nearly 3,850 metres and housed perhaps ten to twenty thousand people at its height. The site is renowned for its monumental stone architecture, built from precisely cut and fitted blocks, including the Akapana pyramid, the Kalasasaya enclosure, and the celebrated Gate of the Sun, carved with an image of a staff-bearing deity. The surrounding landscape was made productive by a sophisticated system of raised fields, known as suka kollus, which used the lake's microclimate to protect crops from frost in the harsh high-altitude environment. Tiwanaku spread its influence across a wide region less through conquest than through the establishment of colonies, such as those in the Moquegua valley of southern Peru, the conduct of long-distance trade, and the diffusion of its religion and distinctive art style, which it shared with the Wari to the northwest. Because it left no written language, the names of its rulers and the details of its political structure are unknown. Around 1000 to 1050 CE the Tiwanaku state collapsed relatively rapidly: ceramic production ended, and the urban core and outlying colonies were abandoned. The cause is debated; an older theory attributing the collapse to prolonged drought has been challenged by recent chronologies, which favour internal social and political dynamics. Its decline gave way to the Aymara kingdoms of the lake basin, later absorbed by the Inca.