Gateway of the Sun

The mystique of the city of Tiwanaku in late pre-Hispanic Andean society was intimately associated with its role as a place of origin in cosmogonic myths. According to the sixteenth-century accounts of Betanzos, Sarmiento, and Molina, it was in Tiwanaku that the creator god Viracocha ordained a new social order, and it was from Tiwanaku that the primeval couple was sent out along symmetrically opposed migratory paths to call forth the nations of the Andean world from springs and rivers, rocks …

The principal urban centres in the southern highlands occupy three major basins: the region called the altiplano, surrounding Lake Titicaca at the boundary between Peru and Bolivia; the region from Ayacucho to Jauja in the Mantaro river valley basin; and the Cuzco region near the headwaters of the Urubamba river. The basin of Lake Titicaca supported early civilizations at Pucará and at Tiahuanaco from about 500 B.C. until after A.D. 500. Thereafter the style of Tiahuanaco spread to the Mantaro …