The Ancient Nephite City of Tiahuanacu – Part IV

There have been numerous investigations of Tiwanaku, most of which result in a confusion of understanding as to how certain things exist there. First, at what is called the Temple of Kalasasaya—“Place of the Vertical Stones”—with its 12-foot tall columns jutting upward at intervals in astronomical observation alignments, is considered an observatory. The columns, which were carved into human figures, are now out of specific alignment causing some to think the ruins are very ancient.

In addition, there are carvings of ancient animals considered extinct, lime sediment on the ruins showing their submersion in ocean water, and the effects of a huge tidal wave that washed over the entire area. All of this, including an ancient, tilted oceanic shoreline and the paradox of an ancient seaport, complete with wharves and docking ports, have suggested to archaeologists that this area is 15,000 years old. These archaeologists discovered alignments with the sun which were slightly "out of true," but which lined up perfectly once the sky-charts were moved back in time, which led to intensive astronomical studies.

Since Earth is tilted on its axis in respect to the plane of the solar system, the resulting angle is known as the "obliqueness of the ecliptic." If viewed from the earth, the planets of our solar system travel across the sky in a line called the “plane of the ecliptic.” At present our earth is tilted at an angle of 23 degrees and 27 minutes, but this angle is not constant. The angle oscillates slowly between 22 degrees and 1 minute minimum to an extreme of 24 degrees and 5 minutes. A complete cycle takes roughly 41,000 years to complete. The alignment of the Kalasasaya temple depicts a tilt of the earth's axis amounting to 23 degrees, 8 minutes, 48 seconds, which according to astronomers, indicates a date of 15,000 B.C. And as recently as the 1990’s, Oswaldo Rivera, the Director of Bolivian National Institute of Archaeology, along with archaeoastronomer Professor Neil Steede, have come to agree that Tiahanacu is at least 12,000 years old.

The earlier conventional practice of dating Tiahuanacu as beginning about 200 A.D. and collapsing about 1000 A.D. started with Wendell Bennett's excavations, which turned up numerous examples of pottery, small statues and other artifacts. Since it is common for later arrivals to be awed by massive ruins (sometimes attributing their origin to supernatural beings, thus replicating the "sacred" images on their own pottery and textiles), it is often a mistake to fuse the two cultures into one, implying that the later arrivals were the same people who built the original ruins—such as the Inca being the builders of ancient Andean ruins. It appears that Bennett and his successors were all guilty of such an error, for many observable indicators show Tiwanaku much older, dating at least into the first millennium B.C.

Yet, other archaeologists and investigators than Bennett, including Dr. Hans Ludendorff (Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Potsdam), Friedrich Becker of the Specula Vaticana, Prof. Arnold Kohlschutter (astronomer at Bonn University), and Rolf Müller (astronomer of the Institute of Astrophysics at Potsdam), verified the accuracy of these alignment findings between 1927 and 1930.

These findings claim that there is only one solution that can satisfy all of the mysteries regarding the ruins of Tiahuanacu, which is none other than the geological cataclysm which affected the entire globe geologically and climatically, causing the Pleistocene extinction and the sinking of Atlantis. Thus, if Tiahuanacu was built before the end of the last Ice Age, then the depiction of the numerous Pleistocene animals (extinct for 12,000 years) are readily explainable. The other indications of the apparent age of the city (tilted seashore lines, lime deposits and silt) would then harmonize with the astronomical alignments built into the buildings, which suggest that Posnansky's original conclusions were correct.

But this complicated assumption is not the only answer. In fact, a far simpler answer is readily available that shows Tiwanaku is not 15,000 years old, but more like 2,500 years old. And the answer is found in the Book of Mormon.

(See the next post, “The Ancient Nephite City of Tiahuanacu – Part V,” the origination of Tiwanaku and why scientists have miscalculated and misinterpreted their findings)