ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Tiwanaku’s centrality, fame, and prestige by exploring the flows of materials that generated the city and the vital engagements of elements and beings that promoted its expansive influence. It investigates Tiwanaku’s ecoregime as an assembly of materials, beings, instantiations, and relations. The chapter describes the vast network that drew water toward and through Tiwanaku, highlighting the site’s primary aquifer and Perimeter Canal. It focuses on monoliths and their scaled instantiation as Presentation, Extended Arm, or Chachapuma beings. The chapter summarizes Tiwanaku’s Formative origins in the southern Lake Titicaca basin. The Late Formative started as a period of long-term drought in the southern Lake Titicaca basin. The chapter examines feature once interpreted as a ‘moat’ was among Tiwanaku’s most impressive monuments, a fluid reciprocal counterpart for its temples, and a channel for liquid flow that shaped the city and its movements. Stone also flowed into and through Tiwanaku, if following very different technologies, cycles, and communities of practice.
