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Although the Peruvian-Bolivian altiplano basin in the Lake Titicaca region is now inhabited by a large population of Aymara Indians who are subsistence farmers, the statues and monolithic remains of Tiahuanáco bear silent testimony to the prior existence of a technologically advanced culture in the region. The site of the remains, which was located about twelve miles south of the southern tip of Lake Titicaca, at an altitude of 13,300 feet, predates the arrival of the Incas. Some archaeologists think that they are the oldest ruins in the world and that Tiahuanáco was once a thriving port of call. They speculate that since the site is now about 800 feet above the edge of the lake that the waters must have dropped 800 feet and receded for about 12 miles. The uniqueness of the Tiahuanáco people has been amply illustrated by the stone sculptures, by the "Gate of the Sun Portal" carved from a single block of stone, and the rectangular thirty feet wide "Kalasasaya Stone Steps". About a mile from the site at an area called "Puma Punku", there are gigantic bluish gray stones that have a reddish rust covering most of them and produce a metallic ringing sound when tapped.
Archaeologists believe
that they were most likely toppled thousands of years ago during a cataclysmic
global flood and/or eruption of the Andes mountains. The storytellers of the
Indians of the Lake Titicaca region told legends about stone structures beneath
the lake waters, which explorers searched for unsuccessfully.
Then in 1980 ACE, Hugo Boero Rojo, a Bolivian scholar, guided by information from the local Indians, located monumental ruins with stone roads and temples built from gigantic blocks of stone about 15-20 metres beneath the surface of the lake off the coast of Puerto Acosta, Bolivia. Rojo concluded that the findings indicated the existence of an advanced pre-Columbian Culture long before the arrival of the Spaniards. Some archaeologists have placed the timeframe for the Tiahuanáco culture at more than 12,000 years before the present era. Chronicle records depicted the residents of ancient Tiahuanáco, the Vairacochas, as a fair skinned people who wore long white robes. Vairacocha, the creator god worshipped by the Huari, the Inca, and the Chavin (a distant relative of their sky god), was portrayed as a fair skinned man with a white beard who wore sandals and a long robe, and carried a staff. From the ancient past to more recent times, South American Indians use the titles Vairacocha when they address white people. The most important of the gold statues representing the Pantheon of Deities in the main sanctuary at Cuzco was that god Vairacocha. Ilya-Tiqsi Wiraqoca Pacayacaiq was his full Inca name, which meant ancient foundation world teacher lord.
Vairacocha was a peace
loving shaman with the cougar, condor, falcon and snake for animal totems.
According to the legends, a belligerent evil people dressed in short clothes
came to the sacred lake of Titicaca. Their discordant presence
forced god Vairacocha and his people, the Vairacochas, to leave Tiahuanaco,
promising that they would return one day... Continue on
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