In the case of an emperor`s death, there would be several days of citywide mourning, while the royal kin gathered from far and wide for the state funeral. The mourning would be characterized by an almost-universal beer-drinking spree, the citizenry reeling and wailing through the avenues.
The dead emperor was buried in a tomb specially constructed for him in one of the temples, his body interred with an immense collection of his wealth, including golden objects, jewelry and textiles. If they were so inclined, the wives of the departed leader could have themselves put to death so they could accompany him into the tomb as well.
The empire`s new leader would be selected from among his sons, usually, but not always, the eldest of them. If other powerful lords felt that a younger son showed more forcefulness or capacity to lead, he would be installed after a period of court intrigue. At his installation the city`s broad avenues would again fill with reeling, drunken revelry.
As soon as the new emperor was firmly in place, the various lords of the kingdom would disperse to their respective fiefdoms, taking up the business of the empire once again.
If life for the commoners and the colonial subjects of Tiwanaku was a good deal less sumptuous than that enjoyed by the elite, it was not without its benefits. First and foremost, the empire offered them security. There was freedom from hunger. And with Tiwanaku`s vast armies, there was constant protection from the hostile kingdoms and savage tribes that lurked on the empire`s frontiers.
That the empire existed for so many hundreds of years is testament enough to its success and the relative satisfaction with which its citizens regarded the government.
”Tiwanaku was the longest-lived empire of all the Andean civilizations,” Kolata says. ”There is no doubt about that. During the centuries of the imperium, there was probably a Pax Tiwanaku, a long, long period of almost universal peace, so it would not be surprising for people to trade their independence for the security of the empire.”
But sometime after 1000 A.D. it all ended. The empire collapsed, the raised fields were abandoned, and Tiwanaku existed no more. No one has a very firm idea why.
”The only thing we`re certain of is that in a 50-year period Tiwanaku disappeared very rapidly and very completely,” says Ponce, dean of Bolivia`s archeological investigators. ”We don`t know what the cause of the eclipse was. We can only disprove some of the early theories and speculate on some later ones.”
One of the earliest theories was that Tiwanaku was wrecked by a cataclysmic earthquake. No archeological excavation, however, has produced any evidence of such a catastrophe, nor is there any geologic record of an event in the Andes powerful enough to have brought down an extensive empire.
Another of the theories was that the empire was invaded and routed by outside armies. Again, Ponce says, there is no archeological evidence to bear out the theory. Except for the looting that occurred after Europeans arrived in the Americas, Tiwanaku`s temples and religious icons by and large have remained as its people left them. Had Tiwanaku been conquered in ancient times, the temples and icons would have been smashed or carried away.
One untested theory holds that Tiwanaku was victimized by a prolonged drought. There is a very modern precedent for such a drought, the so-called
”El Nino” effect of an upper-atmospheric change that has denied adequate rains to equatorial regions in Africa, Asia and South America throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
”We can date the end of Tiwanaku as an organized state more or less between 1150 and 1200 A.D.,” Ponce says. ”In the United States a great drought ended the great pueblo civilization at the same time. A complex state like Tiwanaku, even with its vast storage facilities, would not likely be able to survive a prolonged drought and repeated crop failures for 10, 20 or more years.”
Whatever caused the collapse of the empire, it was supplanted by smaller kingdoms made up of the former subjects of Tiwanaku. The smaller kingdoms, constantly at war with one another, retreated from the vast plains of the altiplano to fortress towns on the mountain sides and adopted a form of terrace farming.
The former lands of the empire were rent with war for more than two centuries. Trade routes died, and technology and artistry regressed. The new mini-kingdoms that replaced Tiwanaku were still fighting among themselves for survival when the armies of the newly emerged Inca empire marched down from Peru in the 1430s and conquered them all.
Pachaquteq Inca Ypanqui founded the Incan empire in 1438, when the Tiwanaku empire had been dead for perhaps 300 years. Pachaquteq made the conquest of the former Tiwanaku lands his first order of business in establishing his empire. He personally visited the ruins of the Tiwanakan imperial city, and when he returned to Cuzco, he ordered that his own royal capital be remodeled on the lines of Tiwanaku.
The Incas were worthy inheritors of Tiwanaku. Within 90 years the Incan empire far outstripped Tiwanaku`s in size, subjugating lands from Colombia to Chile for 3,000 miles around. Trade routes, art and architecture began to flourish again in the Andes. Incan agriculturists, while not reviving the centuries-old raised fields of Tiwanaku, showed an amazing knowledge of irrigation and hydrology of their own, bringing mountainside terrace farms into bloom.
The Incas entrenched themselves so firmly that it appeared their reign over the Andes would match Tiwanaku`s in longevity. But it was not to be.
In 1492, when his three small ships landed on a small Caribbean island, Christopher Columbus in effect breached the watery barrier that had allowed the Americas to develop independently from the rest of mankind for tens of thousands of years of splendid isolation. The sudden appearance of Europeans proved to be every bit as incomprehensible, frightening and dangerous for indigenous American civilizations as it would be today if alien spaceships were to land among us.
To be sure, the Europeans brought to the New World an overwhelming array of weaponry, technology and knowledge that the native Americans had never seen before: sailing ships, horses, guns, swords of tempered steel, wheeled carts, the written language. But of all the things that the conquering Europeans introduced into the Americas, the most devastating were the diseases of the Old World, particularly smallpox, to which the long-isolated natives had no natural immunities.
By the time the first Spaniards landed in Mexico in 1511, the aboriginal populations of the major Caribbean islands were already well on their way to total extinction. In 1528 news spread through the Incan empire that strange, alien men who traveled in large houses that moved through the ocean had been sighted along the Peruvian seacoast. By that time smallpox was killing hundreds of thousands of Aztecs in Mexico and had already moved through Central America into South America.
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By the time Francisco Pizzaro began marching on the Incan empire with his first, full-scale invasion in December, 1530, the deadly European diseases had done much of the conquering for him.
Recent investigations indicate that Huayana Capac, the great Inca emperor of that period, and many of the most influential members of his court probably contracted smallpox and died around 1526. Their deaths set off a struggle of succession between two of the emperor`s sons. The civil war that followed was still being waged by the time Pizzaro arrived in Peru, and the combination of war and pestilence effectively destroyed much of the Incas` capacity to resist Pizzaro`s conquest.
So, like Tiwanaku, the Incan empire abruptly became history. Stunned and sickened, the Inca people looked on in horror as the Spanish invaders smashed their most sacred temples and idols, ripping them apart for gold and silver that were melted down and sent back to Spain.
The Spaniards went so far as to violate the tombs of the dead Incan emperors, ignoring, to the amazement of the Indians, what to them were the truly valuable caches of fine textiles and grabbing only the gold and silver. To the Incas, it was clear that their conquerors were crude barbarians.
Barbarians or not, the Spaniards prevailed, and in prevailing they discarded the Incas` superior form of state management for their own. Wanting to control the countryside, the new rulers forced the Indians off their lands and into newly created villages and a form of tenant farming that drastically cut the amount of land under cultivation. The complex, finely engineered systems of Incan irrigation and cropping fell into disuse, and the soil became depleted.
Even the long-dead Tiwanaku culture along Lake Titicaca`s shores was not spared from the destruction and greed that came with the Europeans. In the 1500s the Spaniards learned of the existence of Tiwanaku and the fabulous ruins of its scattered outposts. The Spanish crown began to grant licenses to loot the ruins the same way it granted mining licenses.
It did not take long before every known Tiwanaku temple site was hacked apart. Many of the exquisitely carved stoneworks in Tiwanaku`s imperial city still lie on the ground, horribly gouged by Spanish looters as
they stripped the ancient temples of their gold cladding.
In fact, until the middle of this century, vast quantities of the stoneworks of Tiwanaku`s imperial city were used as building material for churches and houses. In the 1890s a British construction company contracted by Bolivia to build a railroad from La Paz to Peru went so far as to dynamite temple stoneworks, including irreplaceable monolithic icons, to turn them into gravel for the train tracks.
Time is no respecter of tradition, including European tradition. Many of the grand churches built by the Spanish as they pushed into the Bolivian provinces are now crumbling ruins themselves. There are no priests to serve in them, and the colonial artwork and golden adornments inside them are often stolen by looters.
Bolivia`s Aymara Indians, descendants of the ancient Tiwanakans, were introduced to Catholicism by the Spaniards, but to this day they are still only grudging converts. They observe Christian rituals, but they also continue to pay homage to the ancient animist spirits and to celebrate the ritual days observed in Tiwanakan times. And on those days they dress up in outlandish costumes that caricature the Spaniards as if to mock the people who erased their heritage.
Bolivia now is much more aware of Tiwanaku`s invaluable cultural legacy and despite the country`s poverty is fiercely protective of it. Fortunately, the ancient Tiwanaku empire was so vast in size that many of its greatest works still survive in many sites.
Luqurmata is one of those sites, but Alan Kolata says it is only a starting point for preserving what is left of Tiwanaku. There are other satellite communities even larger and more important than Luqurmata that have never been closely examined by archeologists. Last September Kolata visited one, Khonko Wankane, a day`s walk from the imperial city of Tiwanaku, and laid out plans for next year to examine its raised-field system, which is even larger than that of Luqurmata.
The unexcavated temples and palaces of Khonko Wankane look like nothing more than mounds of scrubby pasturage. But underneath the mounds are temples and palaces Kolata believes were much larger and more significant than those in Luqurmata. The only visible evidence, however, are three great mono-
liths lying on the ground near the mounds. Lichens have already badly damaged the monoliths, much to Kolata`s chagrin.
”This monolith is a cultural treasure like the Taj Mahal,” Kolata says as he strokes one of the fallen icons, ”but because it`s in Bolivia, nobody gives a damn. We`ve got to find somebody to fund the preservation of all this. There are a lot of secrets here. There`s a dead city under our feet, just waiting to be uncovered.”