What is the history of the Tiwanaku archaeological site?

Tiwanaku functioned as the spiritual and political nerve centre of a very advanced pre-Columbian polity; it controlled much of the southern Andes between 500 and 900 AD, well before the Inca civilisation appeared.

At its highest point, the urban area held as many as 40,000 people; thanks to clever, raised-field farming methods, these structures shielded crops from the Altiplano frosts. The people also developed remarkable stonework; they cut huge andesite blocks with precision, even without iron tools. In the end, the whole realm fell apart around 1000 AD, and many historians connect that breakdown to a decades-long drought, a climate disaster that kept intensifying.