Living Landscapes of Night in Tiwanaku, Bolivia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Most treatments of Andean urbanism and urban life emphasize the acts and rhythms of daily life. Ethnohistoric documentation of life in Cuzco, nevertheless, details a rich corpus of ritual sequences and domestic activities that ideally took place under cover of night. In Tiwanaku today, night is an ontological domain in which dangerous nonhuman beings and powerful, ancient carved monoliths may awaken. Recent research on Pre-Columbian centers in the Lake Titicaca basin has demonstrated the importance of nightly observations of the sky and the central role of celestial movements and rhythms in ordering monumental landscapes. In this paper, I draw on these rhythms but redirect attention back to the urban landscape of Tiwanaku itself. I muster evidence from spatial arrangements, routes of human flow, the placement of carved monoliths, and common objects, such as ceramic burners, in an attempt to specifically address nighttime ritual practices and domestic activities. I suggest, among other things, that night was critical for the animacy of carved monoliths that occupied some of Tiwanaku’s most important monumental spaces.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23890