At one time, Tiahuanaco and Puma Punku, the latter a
large earthen platform mound with three levels of stone retaining walls, was
considered to be one of the most memorable sites ever found in the Americas,
and at its peak, it is thought to have been “unimaginably wondrous.” What could
have happened to giant stones weighing a hundred tons each to throw them around
like “popcorn in a skillet?"
One
of several drawings made when Tiahuanaco was first discovered and before the
railroad took huge stones and broke them up for road ballast
Tiahuanacu
(also called Tiwanaku), situated on the shores of Lake Titicaca along the
border of Peru and Bolivia, is a mystery because of its peculiar stone
technology, and because of its age (estimated to be anywhere from first two
millennia B.C. to 17,000 years old). Following the Spanish conquest, when
chroniclers traveled through the Andes asking natives about their history,
etc., they ran across this ancient and impressive site. When asked how old it
was, or who had built it, the Inca could only say they did not know, but it had
been built long before the Inca, and in fact, long before any of their most
ancient ancestors.
In
addition, another interesting factor is involved in Tiahuanaco and that is the
ruins were obviously once at sea level. Every test made bears this out,
including seawater once covering the cliffsides around the ruins, the salt
flats in the drainage direction from the lake where salt water ocean has
evaporated over time, and the ruins of an extensive stone pier and docks that
could berth a hundred ships. There have also been found millions of marine
fishes and seahorses and fossilized seashells, all of which were oceanic types
found only in salt water.
Part of a gigantic dock arrangement though
the ruins are at 12,500 feet and 12 to 15 miles from the nearby Lake Titicaca
(depending on its level), which would not have needed a dock to berth hundreds
of ships
Believed
to have been occupied by between 40,000 and 100,000 occupants, we simply do not
know what the site originally looked like. It appears to have
been destroyed in some great upheaval in ancient times, but it is the seaport
that appears most confusing to archaeologists. Strangely, on the rock cliffs near the piers and wharfs
of the port area are yellow-white calcareous deposits forming long, straight
lines indicating pre-historic water levels.
According to the arguable work of Arthur
Posansky (1945), what appears to be the original seashore is strangely tilted,
as if a tremendous geological upheaval had taken place. It has been pointed out
that the salinity of the lake and its having an "oceanic" fauna was
either faulty or out of date; however, that does not explain all the other
factors that lead to such an upheavel, including Titicaca being the deepest
such navigatable lake in the world, the calcareous water-line deposits, the
extensive size and complexity of the docks, the layered levels of salt flats.
The point is, when put together, all these variables as individual factors seem
possibly answerable, but taken as a whole, there would be no other way to
account for such results but an uplift of such magnitude.
Especially
when you consider that these ancient shorelines are strangely tilted, although
once they must have been level, and such tilting of the ancient shoreline
striations and the abundant presence of fossilized oceanic flora and fauna,
that a tremendous uplift of land took place anciently. In addition, the
surrounding area is covered with millions of fossilized seashells, and oceanic
creatures live to this day in abundance in the salty waters of the lake,
indicating that it was once a part of the ocean, although it is now over 2
miles above sea-level. What seems to be the original seashore is much higher in
one place than in another. This port city, now called Puma Punku or "Door
of the Puma," is an area filled with enormous stone blocks scattered like
matchsticks, and weighing between 100 and 130 tons! One block still in place
weighs an estimated 440 tons! The docks opened to an East Sea (now called the Pebasian Sea by geologists) that once
inundated the South American landmass east of what is now the Andes Mountains.
This was no port city along a lake since some of the docks and piers are so
large that hundreds of ships could dock comfortably,suggesting an enormous
shipping business as singled out by Mormon in his abridgement (Helaman 3:14).
We know of course that the Nephites had a ship-building center along the West
Sea (Alma 63:5), a comparable docking and building arrangement on the East Sea
wold make sense.
This port of Tiahuanacu, called Puma Punku or
"Door of the Puma," is an area filled with enormous stone blocks
scattered hither and yon like matchsticks, yet weighing over 100 tons and one can
only wonder how these blocks were quarried, how they were transported from the
quarries to the building site, and how the builders managed to place such huge
blocks so skillfully to form this massive complex of megalithic buildings. And
above all, what tremendous forces could have tumbled these gigantic stones over
one another as if they were light as driftwood? Archeologists have no answers.
Archaeologists have, however, determined that Tiahuanaco was a
major sacred ceremonial center and focal point of a
culture that spread across much of the region. The ancient people built a stone
pyramid known as the Akapana.
The 59-feet tall Akapana Pyramid
resembles a hill more than a pyramid. Surrounding the pyramid was a large
arrangement of small, single-family homes that were later replaced by large
square compounds; however, by 950 A.D. all building here had stopped
The modern oceanic character of the faunas of Lake Titicaca
and the surrounding water ways, along with the chemical composition of the salt
deserts support the conclusion of a huge uplift of these mountains from out of
the sea in some not-to-distant time. Additional confirmation is to be found in
the recent age of the strand—lines left by this ancient sea on the slopes of
the mountains enclosing the Altiplano.
Bellamy called this body of water the Inter—Andean Sea. Indeed, when H. P. Moon
wrote his account of the geology of the region he put great stress on the “.. .
freshness of many of the strand-lines and the modern character of such fossils
as occur.”
A few miles south of Lake Titicaca lies Tiahuanaco. Of these ruins A. Hyatt
Verrill wrote: “Although the ruins are now over thirteen miles from Lake
Titicaca there are reasons to think that in the days when the city was occupied
it stood on the shores of the Lake itself or on an arm, or bay, for traces of
what was apparently a dock or mole are to be seen just north of the principal
rums. If so the lake has receded.
Bellamy refers to a “canal” which appears to have surrounded the principal
group of ruins at Tiahuanaco, including the structure referred to as the
“fortress” and adds:
Some explorers of the site of Tiahuanaco are of the opinion that the “canal”
was, at most, only a “dry—moat,” and hence will not concede that the peculiar
rectangular depressions near the ruins were once actual docks or harbor basins.
Gold Square: Tiahuanaco; Red Arrow: Direction of
drainage; Right: Salt Flats to the south of Titicaca. Obviously, when the lake
began to drain after being shoved 12,500 feet into the air, ocean salt water
was left along its banks and toward the drainage area to the south, leaving the
famed Salt Flats
Bellamy concluded that the builders of Tiahuanaco, who
obtained their material from quarries many miles distant, for structures which
in their skilled and accurate masonry alone remain a mystery, floated their
stone blocks in a roughly squared condition on large rafts and that the
foundering of these occasionally would leave “dumps” of, in effect, raw
material where now found along the way.
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