ABSTRACT
Until very recently the Late Formative was virtually a cipher in the scheme of Lake Titicaca culture history, crippling attempts to understand Tiwanaku’s early development. As Carlos Lemuz and Jose Luis Paz note (2001:105), it has been the “most obscure, complex, and lest understood” period in the southern basin. For years what little was known of this period came largely from Bolivian excavations in the Kalasasaya platform. At last, research over the past decade allows us to clearly discern two phases in the region, Late Formative 1 and 2 (200 BC-AD 300 and AD 300-500), and is taking great strides in ascertaining social, political, and ideological conditions of the time.
