Ruined ceremonial centre on the Bolivian altiplano near Lake Titicaca, at about 3,850 metres, and the capital of the Tiwanaku polity. Radiocarbon dating and stratigraphy place the monumental core in the first millennium AD, with occupation from a few centuries BC and the state at its height between roughly AD 500 and 1000. The Bolivian-Austrian archaeologist Arthur Posnansky worked there for decades and dated the Kalasasaya enclosure to 15,000 BC, later revised to about 10,000 BC, from the angle at which he believed it had been aligned to the solstices and the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic since. Posnansky said the date rested “solely and exclusively” on that difference. The alignment he measured runs through a partly reconstructed wall, and the method has no standing in archaeology. Graham Hancock uses the early date, together with the andesite blocks and the Puma Punku stonework, as evidence of a far older engineering culture. Zecharia Sitchin goes further and makes it Tin City, a metallurgical capital supplying bronze to the Old World; current archaeology places the founding in the early first millennium AD and finds no such trade.
Connections
Graham Hancock · Precession of the Equinoxes · Nazca Lines · Zecharia Sitchin · Puma Punku · Ollantaytambo · Arthur Posnansky