Prior to the Middle Horizon, neither the Huari nor the Tiahuanaco heartlands seem likely places for the appearance of a state capital capable of extending influences over millions of Andeans. During the preceding Early Intermediate Period, north coast Moche culture was the Central Andean evolutionary apogee. The wealth and power of its principal lords, such as the rulers buried at Sipan, imply a degree of social differentiation and hierarchical power characteristic of civilized, state government. However, if Castillo and Uceda (Chapter 36 in this volume) are correct, the realm was composed of small and competing “peer polities” and never unified into one centralized regional state. But Moche survived into the first century or so of the Middle Horizon, so refined chronological control is required to determine what political and cultural developments were achieved after Wari/Tiwanaku influences impinged on the Moche, and which significantly precede them.
Antecedent conditions around Tiahuanaco are ill-understood, in part because nationalistic narratives about the monumental center exaggerated its antiquity (see Chapter 55 in this volume). When the Moche were constructing great pyramids in the capitals of their “statelets,” during the first half of the Early Intermediate Period, the Pucara site, north of Lake Titicaca in modern Peru, was ascendant in the altiplano. Pucara collapsed between AD 200 and 400, but Tiahuanaco and its heartland do not seem to have become the new altiplano center before about AD 500, and perhaps even somewhat later. In fact, the Tiahuanaco heartland appears somewhat backward during the Early Intermediate Period. A larger settlement was located only 30 km away, near the tip of the Taraco Peninsula (Bandy 2006). But population was growing, perhaps a result of raised fields agricultural technology, exploiting wetlands along the lakeshore. However, there continue to be questions about the chronology and use history of Lake Titicaca’s raised fields. Just to the south of Tiahuanaco are vast grazing lands, and the early monumental center of Khonko Wankani (Janusek et al. 2003).
Huari’s Ayacucho Valley is also poorly known for the Early Intermediate Period Huarpa culture (see Leoni 2006). Settlement survey indicates that population grew immensely and a complex settlement system was developing (MacNeish et al. 1981), perhaps supported by new engineering skills for long irrigation canals, as well as terracing steep hillsides for farming. However, former ceramic classifications have not distinguished the end of the Early Intermediate Period from the early Middle Horizon adequately; therefore dating requires future revisions. The claim that a single state unified the Valley (Leoni 2006; Lumbreras 1974) is based more on evolutionary expectations than on archaeological data: if Huari became an empire early in the Middle Horizon, the antecedent Huarpa culture must have been a state. More probably, the Ayacucho Valley was like the Tiahuanaco heartland, culturally rather backward during the Early Intermediate Period, at least relative to the Moche or Pucara cultures. Certainly, neither heartland stands out as the place that would be expected to produce a great urban capital and expansive state.
As discussed above, Huari and Tiahuanaco were historically related in their ascendancy to prominence - they do not represent independent evolutionary processes. In some respects they were astonishingly similar, but in some others, virtual opposites. This is apparent in the capital cities’ built environments.
The people of Tiahuanaco constructed in two extremes (Figure 37.9). Homes were of adobe, a part of the land that melted back into the altiplano without leaving a trace. Sturdy and warm, but ephemeral, they affirmed generationality. On the other hand, public monuments were megalith-faced pyramids participating in eternal sacred space-time. Within Tiahuanaco’s monumental civic center, gateways, walls, and building perimeters were precisely aligned with sacred phenomena such as mountain-tops and astronomical positions, with commanding vistas and transitional places participating in a cosmos that dwarfed humans as much as the great monuments dwarfed visitors to the metropole (Benitez n. d.; Isbell and Vranich 2004; Vranich 1999, 2002). Carefully organized vistas framed the fagades of platforms, revetted with megalithic stonework of awesome proportion and
Figure 37.9. Map of Tiahuanaco’s civic center and photograph of the megalithic stone revetment on the east face of the Akapana. (Map based on Arellano 1991: fig. 2 and fig. 20; Escalante 1993: fig. 113, fig. 143, fig. 187, fig. 189, fig. 194, fig. 200; Kolata 1993: fig. 5.3, fig. 5.5a, fig. 5.36a and fig. 5.36b; and Manzanilla 1992: fig. 4; Posnansky 1945: plate 1; Vranich 1999: fig. 6.3, fig. 7.1; photo by William H. Isbell)
Precision (Protzen and Nair 2002). Some surfaces may have been covered with burnished metal sheets. Beyond the civic center were simple mud and thatch huts.
Huari people built with field stone (Figure 37.10), covering rough walls with mud that was often finished with shiny white plaster (Isbell et al. 1991). Whether a modest residence or an elite palace, Huari enclosed places with high walls; surviving examples of walls are 2-4 m thick and 8 m tall. Once they constituted multi-floor labyrinthine buildings, proclaiming the domestication of landscapes. Architects shut out nature by building repetitive, modular cells within rectangular block apartments. But chaos was apparently never defeated for the map of Huari reveals no comprehensive city plan. There were tendencies to maintain orientations within areas, but old buildings were razed and new ones constructed with little concern for the former urban grid. Approaching Huari, the visitor was confronted by a confusion of enormous architectural blocks, erupting like jagged white teeth from a skeletal jaw of gray volcanic rock.
Tiahuanaco lies 20 km from the shore of Lake Titicaca, where the valley narrows and rises sharply, providing a unique view of the sacred snowcapped mountain of Illimani to the east, and a fading view of the hallowed lake in the west. The southern horizon is dominated by the three peaks of the, spiritually empowered, Quimsachata range (Alexei Vranich, personal communication). Before the Akapana pyramid was constructed, blocking the old horizon view, the south celestial pole was directly over the highest peak of Quimsachata
Figure 37.10. Civic center of Huari and air photo of massive, fieldstone walls of orthogonal cellular architecture in the vegetation-covered northern sector of the city. (Map and photo by William H. Isbell)
When viewed from Tiahuanaco’s Semisubterranean Temple, through its entrance. From this vantage, dark cloud constellations of the Milky Way appeared to ascend from, and return to, the Semisubterranean temple (Benitez n. d.).
Huari was sited on a long spur of elevated land that projects from the valley side, with deeply entrenched streams surrounding it. Success of the city probably reflected new irrigation technology, based on long canals through difficult terrain, providing water to residents as well as irrigated terraces on slopes below. Approaching the city travelers ascend and descend the broken valley terrain. The city comes into sight, is lost, comes into sight again, disappearing and reappearing, until the trail narrowed into a walled street in which visibility was limited to pedestrians before and behind, and a slice of sky above.
Tiahuanaco underwent a dramatic transformation between AD 600 and 700 (Isbell and Vranich 2004; Kolata 2003; Vranich 1999, 2002) that established new monumental standards for civic architecture and greatly increased the resident population. New international ceramic styles replaced many of the old pottery shapes, implying changes in cuisine as well as comensal etiquette - probably associated with new feasting events linked to the SAIS religious innovation. Old buildings, the Semisubterranean Temple, and perhaps the Kalasasaya and poorly understood Kerikala, were selectively dismantled (Couture 2004; Couture and Sampeck 2003) to build new structures that included the Putuni, the remodeled Kalasasaya, the Kantatayita, and, most visibly, the towering Akapana pyramid. At the western entrance to the city construction began on the Pumapuncu.
Before this urban renewal, Tiahuanaco’s civic center consisted primarily of the small Semisubterranean Temple, with an early version of the Kalasasaya added somewhat later. The Semisubterranean Temple was carefully aligned to observe the Milky Way over the Quimsachata peak as well as lunar extremes. But, the old view of the southeastern horizon was blocked by the lofty new Akapana Pyramid, certainly a deliberate act. Probably at more or less the same time, renovations in the Kalasasaya added the Balconera wall (Figure 37.9), whose monumental ashlars track annual solar movement against the western horizon. Apparently, Tiahuanaco’s seventh-century architectural transformations included the change from an old lunar almanac to a new solar calendar, with focal astronomical observations shifting from the Semi-subterranean Temple to the refurbished new Kalasasaya. SAIS iconography on the later Gate of the Sun expresses the solar year, so Tiahuanaco’s architectural renovation probably corresponds with the adoption of SAIS supernaturals, and new ritual practices keyed to the solar year.
Tiahuanaco became the primary pilgrimage objective of the southern Andes, with its major entrance the west-facing Pumapuncu mound. Monumental buildings had deliberate circulation routes and programmed vistas. Vranich’s (1999) study of the Pumapuncu indicates that visitors ascended the mound and entered a narrow corridor, probably passing through a megalithic gateway, to suddenly emerge in a courtyard with a view of the sacred Illimani Mountain, the Akapana Pyramid, and residential suburbs beyond the hallowed civic center. Along these and other routes, selected locations were probably punctuated with music, song, dance, and perhaps even costumed performances. Many of Tiahuanaco’s residents were employed in maintaining the on-going spectacle, and others probably produced goods sought by visitors, including souvenirs of the holy pilgrimage.
Nineteenth - and early twentieth-century consensus was that Tiahuanaco had been a vacant ceremonial center (Squier 1877). In the mid-twentieth century dense refuse littering the entire surface was finally understood to indicate a sizable ancient population (Parsons 1968). At that time scholars were rethinking ancient American cities, arguing that many had been great demographic centers. However, arguments sometimes ran to excess. Carlos Ponce (1981) declared that Tiahuanaco’s urbanized area totaled some 4 to 6 km2 with a resident population of 50,000, and perhaps as many as 100,000. Alan Kolata (1993: 205) affirmed 30,000 to 60,000, with about 115,000 in the greater urbanized Tiahuanaco heartland. However, evidence was lacking, and a decade later Kolata (2003: 15) withdrew to a more modest figure of 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants. I find this the most convincing estimate.
At Tiahuanaco’s peak thousands of hectares of raised fields were under intensive cultivation in the wetlands along the shores of Lake Titicaca. In spite of continuing disagreements about ancient productivity (Erickson 2003; Kolata 1993, 2003), this widely distributed South American agricultural system appears to have provided Tiahuanaco a relatively secure agricultural base, despite high altitude and frequent frosts. It is now argued that a century-long drought beginning about AD 1100 devastated altiplano raised-field production, causing Tiahuanaco’s collapse (Kolata 2003). This is thought-provoking research, but conclusions are far from confirmed.
Modern architectural reconstructions at Tiahuanaco, especially the Kalasasaya, violate the original forms. Stone blocks from some of the original walls were extracted to reconstruct others. Furthermore, artists’ renderings of the metropole depict it as an open city crisscrossed by great avenues that defined a single urban grid to which pyramids and public squares were oriented (Escalante 1993). Some scholars (Kolata 1993; Kolata and Ponce 1992) add a surrounding moat, converting the civic center into a sacred island. However, much of this imagery comes from romantic speculation early in the twentieth century (Posnansky 1910). Other Andean cities consisted of securely-walled compounds and enclosures of different sizes, with little evidence for great avenues, expansive public spaces, or a universal grid. In fact, some of the regularity of Tiahuanaco’s urban grid and building orientation appearing in recent maps has apparently resulted from plotting difficult-to-locate building corners in terms of grid-based expectations, rather than the real spot.
Current ground penetrating radar and excavations at Tiahuanaco are showing that the altiplano capital was more like other Andean cities than formerly thought (Alexei Vranich, personal communication). Around the Akapana pyramid, Semisubterranean Temple, and Kalasasaya, a great gravel plaza with subterranean drains was constructed, but over older architecture, in a great urban renewal program. Later, even this plaza was being covered with rectangular enclosures, many probably the residences of elite individuals and groups.
Several compounds excavated near the center of Tiahuanaco are interpreted as palaces (Couture 2004; Kolata 1993, 2003), and, of course, archaeologists can learn a great deal about ancient political organization by examining ruins of palaces. Tiahuanaco’s most extensively studied example was named the “Palace of the Multicolored Rooms.” But it is very small, about 20 to 25 m long and 7 or 8 m wide, no larger than a third - or fourth-order Inca chief’s home, and significantly smaller than the public building at Omo M-10, also perhaps a palace. Other Tiahuanaco architectural complexes, tentatively identified as palaces, are equally small. If these small residences were the palaces of Tiahuanaco’s senior leaders, I doubt the existence of a supreme monarch. More probable would be some kind of council or senate in command of the city, with a larger number of less exalted top leaders.
Alternatively, buildings identified as Tiahuanaco’s palaces may have been only part of original royal residences, such as the kitchens and retainers’ quarters. The Palace of the Multicolored Rooms is attached to the rear of the Putuni, a small but monumental enclosure, that lies right behind the great Kalasasaya. Perhaps the three buildings constituted a single complex, all of which was a royal palace (Figure 37.9). Together, the form - a sequence of enclosed patios in descending size, with impressive gateways between them - bears significant resemblance to later Inca palaces, as do Tiahuanaco’s Pumapuncu complex, and even the Akapana. Royal palaces of this magnitude would imply that Tiahuanaco was ruled by kings wielding astonishing power.
The Tiahuanaco rulership question has been addressed with sculpture. Tiahuana-co’s monumental stone statues represent kings (Figure 37.7), with their prominence in the metropole demonstrating royal power. However, the statues seem deliberately generic, without distinguishing features. Furthermore, Berenguer (2000) points out that many of the statues carry what appear to be a kero goblet, and a snuff tablet. Paraphernalia for hallucinogenic trance seems more properly associated with shamanism than rulership, unless shamanism and rule were more integrated in Tiahuanaco sociopolitical structure than anthropologists generally imagine.
It would be attractive to use Tiahuanaco mortuary practices to identify rulers and elites, but information is scarce. Hundreds and perhaps thousands of graves were looted in the past to create spectacular private collections of Tiwanaku artifacts, but written descriptions of the tombs are not available. Archaeologically-excavated graves range from simple holes to stone-lined pits or cists, to shafts with bell-shaped chambers, to shafts with side chambers. Most graves contain a single individual, flexed and seated or reclining to one side, with several ceramic vessels, and perhaps some jewelry. Feline incense burners, often with heavily-sooted interiors, are found in some graves, and may identify burials of shamans. Small objects of gold occur, usually cut from thin sheets of foil. Tiwanaku graves from Moquegua, although mostly looted, appear similar to those of the highlands.
To date, no truly spectacular tombs have been reported from the capital, or elsewhere within the Tiwanaku sphere. The most wealthy tomb is surely the “Treasure of San Sebastian” in Cochabamba, if the casual discovery made in 1916 really represents the grave of a Tiwanaku provincial official, as consistently asserted (Berenguer 2000: 72-73). Even this find—a costume of gold consisting of a staff, sandals, wide arm and leg bracelets, two pectoral disks, belt, epaulets, necklace, ear ornaments, a large forehead ornament, a golden bowl and many sequins originally sewn onto a tunic and/or skirt—could not have weighed more than a single gold backflap of a Moche Lord from Sipan. Perhaps more significantly, the kinds of gold ornaments - broad arm and leg bracelets, circular pectorals, forehead ornament - are not shown in Tiahuanaco sculpture. If these gold objects constituted the uniform of a Tiwanaku governor, similar accessories were not shown on metropole monoliths. I suspect that the costume is not Tiwanaku, but later - the ruler of an early post-Tiwa-naku kingdom.
Unlike Tiahuanaco, Huari has no megalithic pyramids. Its architecture avoided volumetric forms in favor of labyrinthine enclosures. Rough-stone masonry with gleaming white plaster was used for palaces, temples, and domestic residences (Isbell and Vranich 2004).
Some of Huari’s buildings were constructed of carefully shaped and fitted ashlars. Examples include a semi-subterranean temple at Moraduchayuq, a royal mausoleum at Monjachayoq, and noble tombs at Cheqo Wasi. Cut stones are present at Marayniyoq, and unassociated blocks are found here and there about the Huari metropole, including examples reused in late rough-stone walls. So stone-cutting was known, although megalithic masonry has not been common enough at Huari to be one of its defining architectural characteristics. Significantly, it is becoming apparent that cut stones were looted from Huari in quantities exceeding our former understanding, probably beginning in early Spanish Colonial times. Perhaps megalithic architecture was quite a lot more common in the ancient city than in its twentieth-century ruins.
Huari’s architectural compounds were carefully planned, beginning with foundations and drains, up through doorways and roofs. Most were divided into rectilinear or trapezoidal grids with a small repertoire of modular “apartments” repeated over and over, giving Huari architecture its descriptive name, “orthogonal cellular” (Isbell 1991). Circular or D-shaped buildings seem to have been temples.
The most popular modular cell consisted of an open courtyard, surrounded on three or four sides by elongated rooms or halls, about 2 m wide, of one, two, and possibly three stories. A wider room, a niche hall, or some other form might occupy one side of the patio. Around the edge of the courtyard was a broad bench raised about 30 cm above the patio floor, and about 100 to 175 cm wide, that was probably covered by long eaves of the multistoried halls. These benches made excellent work spaces, sheltered, but well lit. By contrast, the narrow, roofed halls seem to have had only one or two doorways, and no other sources of light, so it is likely that they were dark, and fit primarily for storage and perhaps sleeping [Note 4]. Nonetheless, many patio groups were residences, and are probably best understood as apartment houses.
More or less continuous remains of stone architecture - including enormous enclosures - and dense occupational trash cover an area of about 2.5 km2 at Huari. Traces of refuse and occasional walls sprawl over another 15 km2 of rugged terrain. The most conservative techniques for estimating prehistoric population suggest 10,000 to 20,000 people in the city at its peak, while more liberal assumptions imply some 35,000 to 70,000 inhabitants (Isbell et al. 1991). An estimate of 20,000 to 40,000 seems most reasonable, so in all probability, demographically, Huari and Tiahuanaco were similar, with Huari probably a bit larger at their apogees.
As a city, Huari coalesced from several earlier villages slightly before the beginning of the Middle Horizon, about AD cal 650. I suspect that its original core consisted of several palace compounds that attracted migrants to settle around them as retainers. However, Huari buildings were probably never unifunctional, but constantly “becoming.” Vegachayoq Moqo, the largest excavated area in the ancient city, appears to have begun as a palace, or royal court, with a roofed, stage-like space for formal events that overlooked an assembly space. Later, a D - shaped temple was constructed in the patio, probably a mortuary monument in honor of a deceased king or royal dynasty. Eventually a great wall was built across the court that contained many tombs for dead of modest status. So Vegachayoq Moqo seems to have begun as a palace, to become a royal mortuary monument where visitors revered high-status dead. Still later it became a cemetery for persons of intermediate and perhaps even low status, a function that may have continued until the city was abandoned. But some parts of the building, and especially the elite residential area and stagelike court, were deliberately buried as the building complex was remodeled.
Across a walled street from Vegachayoq Moqo is Monjachaoq, dreadfully looted, but containing remains of a royal tomb deep below its surface (Isbell 2004; Perez 1999). Since it is unlikely that the Monjachaoq tomb belonged to the king who resided at Vegachayoq Moqo, the southwestern portion of Huari probably included several royal palaces, occupied by a series of kings.
Monjachaoq, 0.5 km to the east, is a space initially occupied by an impressive, semisubterranean temple of cut stone, that is so reminiscent of Tiahuanaco architecture that it might have been constructed by Tiwanaku workmen (Isbell 1991). The temple was probably built in Middle Horizon 1, about the same time Huari and Tiahuanaco intruded into the Moquegua Valley. Perhaps the two did engage in war, with victorious Huari bringing captured soldiers, experienced in Tiahuanaco megalitihic construction techniques, back to their own capital to labor for new masters. But this is speculation. Perhaps stone cutting and megalithic masonry are not so difficult to reinvent semi-independently. More research is needed.
After several remodelings the Moraduchayuq temple was leveled. A rectangular enclosure was built and subdivided into standardized cells, each consisting of a patio surrounded by elongated halls, with at least a second floor that was probably of similar plan. These patio groups housed people of intermediate status, inferred to have been permanent residents, probably minor administrators within Huari’s politico-economic bureaucracy.
Refuse at Moraduchayuq contained few special tools associated with craft production or agriculture. Luxury goods imply at least some status for the residents, and large quantities of food-serving vessels suggest consumption beyond the level of households, probably institutionalized feasting. Since remains of kitchens are small enough to have been domestic, food served at feasts may have been prepared elsewhere. Moraduchayuq residents seem to have been part of a larger organization, probably Huari’s government, perhaps middle managers within the state apparatus, who offered periodic feasts to the workers they supervised (Isbell et al. 1991).
A third area excavated at Huari is Cheqo Wasi, where several concentrations of megalithic chamber tombs were found (Isbell 2004; Perez 1999). These impressive graves represent the second highest level in Huari’s social hierarchy, well above the residents of Moraduchayuq, and immediately below the royal tomb identified at Monjachaoq. Unfortunately, heavy looting makes interpretation of Cheqo Wasi difficult, and none of the compounds was completely defined by excavators. Does this concentration of megalithic tombs represent a dedicated noble cemetery, or the mortuary rooms of several palaces that happened to intersect in this part of the city?
Huari’s urban core seems too congested to accommodate the heavy flow of visitors that pilgrimage involves. Based on what we currently know, Huari’s streets were narrow and walled. Visitors would have required guides to avoid losing their way in the confusing compounds between these arteries. And there were no great open spaces like the plaza of remodeled Tiahuanaco. However, several hilltops overlooking Huari have remains of extensive Middle Horizon buildings, and ample space for large numbers of campers. From the peak of Cerro Churu, where a huge rectangular ruin is located, Huari occupies the north horizon, while turning in the opposite direction reveals the Huamanga Basin with the southern Peruvian cordillera behind. On a great ridge north of Huari is Marayniyoq with Middle Horizon ruins that include spectacular megalithic construction, today reduced to foundations from looting. It has a commanding view of Huari to the south, and the opposite gaze reveals the Huanta Valley, Mantaro River, and the central Peruvian cordillera beyond. Perhaps Huari was at least a little like Tiahuanaco in serving as an objective for pilgrimage, but if so, visitors’ experiences were choreographed very differently.
Huari has several stone monoliths that represent humans, all without SAIS iconography. In fact, none has any fine-line incision, the technique used for most SAIS sculptural representations at Tiahuanaco. Could Huari’s statues represent kings, as suggested, but certainly not confirmed, for Tiahuanaco?
Huari has a second city - Conchopata - in the southern “Huamanga enclave” of the Ayacucho Valley (Figure 37.2; Cook and Benco 2001; Isbell and Cook 2002; Knobloch 2000; Ochatoma and Cabrera 2002; Tung and Cook 2006), only 20 to 40 ha in size. Early in its history, Conchopata seems to have competed with other settlements. Its achievement of local dominance probably related to adoption of SAIS iconography, followed by success in ritual more than in military accomplishments - although strontium analysis indicates that “trophy heads” in two of Conchopata’s temples were probably foreigners, not local ancestors (Knudson and Tung in press). Perhaps Conchopata even competed with Huari at an early moment, and interacted with Tiahuanaco in the Middle Horizon 1B synthetic reconfiguration of SAIS iconography. A unique art theme shows warriors riding in reed canoes as they brandish weapons (Ochatoma and Cabrera 2002). Perhaps this represents heroes who journeyed to the altiplano, across sacred Lake Titicaca, to negotiate a new religious ideology with Tiahuanaco counterparts.
SAIS images known from Huari tend to be later than at Conchopata, and on regular-size vessels, implying their more secular nature. But little of Huari has been excavated, although a surprising recent discovery at Vegachayoq Moqo includes a textile fragment decorated with Profile Attendants. Spectacular unprovenienced textiles with SAIS icons, some of them remarkably similar to images painted on oversize Conchopata vessels have been described by William Conklin (1970, 2004). These fine weavings were surely produced in specialized highland workshops that remain to be discovered by archaeologists.
The nature of relations between Huari and Conchopata is not clear, but mortuary remains imply that Conchopata’s rulers were at least two steps below the supreme dignitaries of Huari. Much of the surviving architecture seems to represent small palaces where polygynous nobles vied for power and prestige, employing feasts and banquets as one competitive medium. Wives and concubines manufactured pottery for special events, some decorated with SAIS icons. But these women were also constructing more visible new “urban woman” identities based on their control of pottery making, brewing, and other comensal practices. Diet at Conchopata was maize-based, with no difference between men and women (Finucane et al. in press).
The Huari heartland includes several examples of planned orthogonal cellular architecture, ranging from tiny Jargampata, to immense Azangaro. These sites often include terraces and irrigation canals that were almost certainly constructed by corvee labor. It seems likely that all were functionally similar to Inca royal estates - rural centers of intensive agriculture, owned and managed by kings and nobles to enhance personal wealth and power. If so, “royal estates” are much more obvious around Huari than at Tiahuanaco.
Little is known about the collapse of Huari, but in the central and south highlands SAIS iconography disappeared entirely, as did urban centers and complex political units. Change was profound. However, excavations in Huari’s Moraduchayuq compound indicate gradual abandonment, so it seems that violent military conquest is unlikely, as well as similar catastrophes. In recent years we have learned that the capital was probably occupied for a century or more than formerly believed, until the end of the Middle Horizon (in Epoch 4, not Epoch 2, as formerly believed), so some progress is being made. A few scholars have sought to explain Huari’s abandonment with the same drought implicated for Tiahuanaco, but even in the altiplano this interpretation lacks confirmation, so its extension to Huari seems premature. A great deal more archaeological research is called for.
World History
