The author breathes life into the ruins of Tiwanaku, a high altitude city and its suburbs near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia that flourished from 200 BC to 900 AD. It was a golden age legend suffused with spiritual power for the Inca at the time of the Conquest. Tiwanaku was the metropolitan epicenter of an advanced civilization whose "colonial" empire, in the form of a discontinuous `vertical archipelago,' spanned a variety of environments from the Pacific to the upper Amazon. Many passages in the book provide extraordinary vignettes of this enigmatic people.
The author is an archaeologist, but the context of his research project was an interdisciplinary collaboration with other scientists, experts, assistants, and students, both Bolivian and foreign. Among the most interesting to me are the experimental reconstructions that project members undertook. For example, they partially restored and grew native crops on several industrial scale agricultural structures, originally built by the ancients, known as "raised fields." These artifacts outwardly resemble enclosed, modular, rectangular mazes of water that surround peninsular strips of earth (p. 164). Sited along the irrigation canals like beads on a string, they produce their own fertilizer from the alga growing in their water. The raised fields function as passive solar collectors that accumulate sufficient heat during the day to enable crops such as potatoes and quinoa to withstand the hard freezes so frequent on the high Andean plains. This technology permits planting and harvesting two bountiful crops a year in an area whose fields ordinarily produce poorly. The raised fields were sophisticated units of productive capital investment, but were not the only factory-like facilities located near the city.
Good bibliography; greyscale illustrations (for color see Tiwanaku: Ancestors of the Inca); no glossary; lazy indexing.
- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell (December 8, 1993)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1557861838
- ISBN-13: 978-1557861832
- Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 3 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,261,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3646 in Anthropology (Books)
- #1397 in South American History (Books)
- #874 in Latin American History (Books)
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