All over the flat valley bottom there lie scattered huge hewn blocks, some of the sandstone which is here the underlying rock, some of andesite apparently brought on balsas from quarries many miles away (when perhaps the lake water came up this far). I measured one massive prostrate stone lying near the staircase and found it to be thirty-four feet long by five feet wide with one and one-half feet out of the ground. How much there was below ground could not be ascertained. Yet the stones that remain to-day scattered over a space more than a mile long are few compared to those which have during centuries past been carried away. The church and many of the houses in the village are built of them. The Cathedral and other edifices in La Paz have been built of them, and within the last ten years five hundred train-loads of them were carried off by the constructors of the railway to build bridges, station houses, and what not, along the line. It is pitiable to think that this destruction of the most remarkable prehistoric monument in the western world should have been consummated in our own days.
Whether there was ever a city at Tiahuanaco there is nothing to shew. The place may have been merely a sanctuary or, perhaps, a royal fortress and place of worship combined. If there was ever a population of the humble class, they lived in mud huts which would quickly disappear and leave no trace. The modern village is composed of such huts, with some of the stones of the ruins used as foundations. Nevertheless the size of the church and its unusually rich decoration, and its handsome silver altar, suggest that the place was formerly more important than it is to-day. Pottery and small ornaments are still found in the earth, though the treasures, if ever there were any, have been carried off long ago. An arrow point of obsidian, which an Indian shewed me, was interesting as evidence that the ancient inhabitants used bows and were not, as apparently were the Peruvians of Cuzco, content with slings as missile weapons.[34]
The valley is fertile, and much of it cultivated, but at this season, before the crops had begun to pierce the earth, it was very dreary. The brown hills all around are themselves bare and featureless, and they cut off the view of the snowy Cordillera and of the lake. The sight of this mass of ruins, where hardly one stone is left upon another in a place where thousands of men must have toiled and many thousands have worshipped, makes its melancholy landscape all the more doleful. It recalls the descriptions in the Hebrew prophets of the desolation coming upon Nineveh.
Aymará tradition, with its vague tales of giants who reared the mound and walls and of a deity who in displeasure turned the builders into stones and for a while darkened the world, has nothing more to tell us than the aspect of the place suggests, viz., that here dwelt a people possessed of great skill in stonework and obeying rulers who had a great command of labour, and that this race has vanished, leaving no other trace behind. Upon one point all observers and all students are agreed. When the first Spanish conquerors came hither, they were at once struck by the difference between these works and those of the Incas which they had seen at Cuzco and elsewhere in Peru. The Indians whom they questioned told them that the men who built these things had lived long, long before their own forefathers. Who the builders were, whence they came, how and when and whither they disappeared—of all this the Indians knew no more than the Spaniards themselves knew, or than we know now. The width of the interval between the greatness of Tiahuanaco and the Conquest appears also by the fact that the Inca sovereigns had not treated it as a sacred spot in the way they did the shrine at Copacavana or the islands in Titicaca, nor has it to-day any special sanctity to the Indians of the neighbourhood. To them it is only what the Pyramids are to a wandering Arab or Stonehenge to a Wiltshire peasant. The one thing which the walls have in common with those in and around Cuzco is the excellence of the stonework. The style of building is different, but the cutting itself is equally exact and regular. This art would seem to have arisen early among the races of the plateau, doubtless because the absence of wood turned artistic effort towards excellence in stone.
One receives the impression here, as in some other parts of Peru, that the semi-civilization, if we may call it so, of these regions is extremely ancient. We seem to look back upon a vista whose length it is impossible to conjecture, a vista of many ages, during which this has been the home of peoples already emerged from such mere savagery as that in which the natives of the Amazonian forests still lie. But how many ages the process of emergence occupied, and how many more followed down to the Spanish Conquest we may never come to know.
It is possible that immigrants may at some time, long subsequent to the colonization of America by way of Behring's Sea, have found their way hither across the waters of the Pacific. The similarity of the figures on Easter Island to the figures at Tiahuanaco has been thought to suggest such a possibility. Those figures are, I believe, unlike anything in any other Pacific island.
Archæological research, however, does not suggest, any more than does historical enquiry, the existence of any external influence affecting the South American races. We may reasonably assume that among them, as in Europe, the contact and intermixture of different stocks and types of character and culture made for advancement. But this great factor in the progress of mankind, which did so much for western Asia and Europe, and to the comparative absence of which the arrested civilization of China may be largely due, was far less conspicuously present in South America than on the Mediterranean coasts. Think what Europe owed not only to the mixture of stocks whence the Italo-Hellenic peoples sprang, but also to influences radiating out from Egypt and the West Asiatic nations. Think what Italy owed to Greece and afterwards to the East and of what modern European nations owe to the contact of racial types in literature, art, and ideas, such as the Celtic, the Iberian, the Teutonic, and the Slavonic. How different was the lot of the Peruvians, shut in between an impassable ocean on the west, a desert on the south, and the savage tribes of a forest wilderness on the east! No ideas came to them from without, nor from any of the inventions which Old World peoples had been making could they profit. They were out of contact even with the most advanced of the other American peoples, such as those of Bogotá and Yucatan, for there was a vast space between, many shadowy mountains and a resounding sea.
As after these ruins I saw no others in South America, for neither southern Bolivia nor Chile nor Argentina, nor Uruguay has any to shew, this seems the fittest place for such few thoughts on the ancient civilization of South America as are suggested to the traveller's mind by the remains of it which he sees and by what he reads in the books of historians and archæologists. A large part of the interest which Peru and Bolivia have for the modern world is the interest which this ancient civilization awakens. It is a unique chapter in the history of mankind.
The most distinct and constantly recurring impressions made by the remains is this: that the time when man began to rise out of mere savagery must, in these countries, be carried very far into the past. Our data for any estimate either of the duration of the process by which he attained a sort of civilization or of the several steps in it, are extremely scanty. In the Old World the early use of writing by a few of its peoples enables us to go a long way back. The records which Egypt and Babylon and China have been made to yield are of some service for perhaps three or even four thousand years—some would say more—before the Christian era, and from those of Egypt and Babylon we get at least glimpses of the races that lived in Asia Minor and along the Mediterranean coast. But none of the American peoples advanced as far as the invention of even the rudest form of writing, though in Mexico and Yucatan pictures were to some slight extent used to preserve the memory of events. Here, in South America, where neither writing nor pictures aid us, our only data for what may be called prehistoric history, are first, the remains of buildings, whether fortresses or palaces or temples, and, secondly, works of art, such as carvings, ornaments, or religious objects, utensils of wood or earthenware and paintings on them, weapons of war, woollen or cotton fabrics, such as ponchos or mummy-cloths. All such relics are more abundant in Peru than anywhere else in the Western world, except that in Yucatan and some parts of Central America the ruined temples have been preserved better than here. The Peruvian relics are found not only in the Andean plateau, but also in those parts near the coast of northern Peru where cultivation was rendered possible by rivers. There, at the ruins of the Chimu city, near Truxillo, and farther south at Pachacamac, near Lima, a great deal has been obtained by excavation in ancient cemeteries and temples; and much more would have been obtained but for the damage wrought by generations of treasure seekers who melted down all the gold they found and destroyed nearly everything else.
The objects found on the coast differ in style from those found on the high Andean regions, and among these latter there are also marked differences between things found at Cuzco, and generally in northern Peru, and things found in the tombs and graves in the Titicaca regions. All, however, have a certain family resemblance and form a distinct archæological group somewhat nearer to Mexican and Central American art than to anything in the Old World. Specimens of all can be just as well studied in the museums of Europe and North America as here on the spot, where the collections are neither numerous nor well arranged. There is, perhaps, more fertility of invention, more freedom of treatment and more humour in the objects found on the coast at Chimu and Pachacamac than in any others; but the most impressive of all are the sculptures of Tiahuanaco.