May 9 - Tiwanaku

Today was our last day of the GAP tour, but sadly most people didn't show up for the trip and instead opted to stay in La Paz and partake in a city tour. It was unfortunate that the group felt this excursion was unnecessary as they missed an interesting day, especially since most of them still had another two days in La Paz.

The Tiwanaku site is located about 1.5 hours outside of La Paz (main reason for most people not coming) and was the spiritual and political centre of the Tiwanaku culture, a pre Inca civilization that dated from 600BC to 700AD. With things still being discovered at this site, it was granted UNESCO world heritage status only a few years ago.

Our tour started with two different museums at the Tiwanaku site. The first of these museums housed only a statue and reed boat. The statue was the Megalito Bennetto Pachamama, the source of most of our knowledge of the Tiwanaku culture. This massive statue was carved in the resemblance of Pachamama (Quechwa for mother earth) and is covered with different symbols that have been interpreted to show the 4 seasons, 365 days of the year and symbols for the solstice and equinox. As we soon learned, this is all speculative and most of the information just gets sketchy. There was also a reed boat that was constructed to help show how the rocks had been moved across Lake Titicaca to this site. The plan is to move all the main statues and sun gate to this museum, away from the archeological site, so as to better preserve them.

The second museum was a little better, but was more like a grade 5 science project than a serious archeological museum. This museum’s focus was on the pottery found in and around the archeological site. The guide did her best to explain the findings, making some very bold claims including how some of the pottery represents Spaniards (even though they didn’t arrive for another 1,000 years after the fall of the culture) and Mongolians. As we had seen better museums of indigenous artifacts, this didn’t interest us much, and the bold claims just started to annoy us after a while.

The reason for these bold, unsubstantiated claims is that only 1% of the site has been excavated. The Bolivian government only needs about $10 million to fully excavate the site, but as of now have only received $1 million in funding. As such, our next stop on the tour, the actual archeological site, was an active site where discoveries were being made and excavated while we were there. While walking around you could see the remains of the religious pyramid that quickly faded into the dirt of the hill from which it is being excavated (they told us the culture built it and then buried it before abandoning the site ... yet again, a little far fetched, especially since Machu Picchu was naturally buried under dirt after only 300 years). There were also some bones being carefully excavated from the base of the pyramid.

The site is rather unimpressive at this time, but part of that has to do with having already visited the Inca ruins in the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu. Even though it wsa fascinating to watch them actually excavate a new archeological site, it was more interesting to hear the guide’s interpretations of the ruins and how she presented them as fact (keep in mind only 1% has been uncovered so you can’t make assumptions ... it’s kind of like visiting only the subway of New York and determining that the entire United States is built underground). Some of her assumptions were based on the Sun Gate where she concluded the Tiwanaku culture had determined there were 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 12 months in a year, and 365 days in a year. Very interesting that they had invented the exact same calendar as the Europeans, especially since the closest culture to have developed a calendar were the Mayans, and they determined there were 20 months in a year (She did say that maybe their culture believed in 20 months, as behind the sun gate there was a wall with 10 large stones in it. She said they moved an idol from one stone to another to mark each passing month).

Her assumptions didn’t end there. The last site we visited, a sunken temple, she claimed was a place to worship the afterlife. She believed that the pyramid was to worship the sun and that above us, the sun temple (at ground level) was to worship the earth and the life we currently are living (forget that she also told us this was the astronomical observatory) and the sunken temple was for worshiping the afterlife (as you can see, they need to do some more excavation). The sunken temple though was incredibly interesting as its walls were adorned with over 100 carved heads sticking out of the wall. All in all this made for the most interesting part of the whole archeological site.

After lunch, we headed back to La Paz for some shopping around the hotel in the artisan markets, and a final dinner with the rest of our group at a lovely French restaurant. Looking back, this was a great group to travel with and the trip offered a wonderful overview of the Inca Empire.