Puma Punku

PUMA PUNKU
The Port to the City

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This is a 'temple area' with many finely cut stones, many weighing well over 100 tons. It is positioned to the south of the Akapana Pyramid. The ancient builders left no written records, all the legends have been handed down through the generations.

Puma Punku truly startles the imagination. It seems to be the remains of a great wharf that serviced Tiahuanaco, and a massive, four-part building, now collapsed, as seen in figure 1 and 2. One of the construction blocks from which the pier was fashioned weighs an estimated 440 tons and several other blocks laying about are between 100 and 150 tons. The quarry for these giant blocks was on the western shore of Titicaca, some fifteen kilometres away. There is no known technology in all the ancient world that could have transported stones of such massive weight and size. The Andean people of 500 A.D., with their simple reed boats, to whom orthodox historians have attributed as being the builders of these massive edifices, could certainly not have moved them. Even today, with all the modern advances in engineering and mathematics, we could not fashion such a structure.

Figure 3: The famous grooved stone at Puma Punku. Click for larger image. For a closeup of the drillholes, click here. Or, for a very large image, click here.(237 kb).

Figure 1: An example of the ruins of the four-part building.

Figure 2: Another example of the collapsed four-part building.

Most of the blocks use at the site are diorite, granite, or andesite, all of which are far from soft stones. So the question remains; how did the ancient architects carve these monstrous blocks? This question becomes all the more intriguing when the infamous 'Grooved Stone' is taken into account, as seen in figure 3. This block has along its longest side a precision-made, 6mm wide groove, containing eqidistant drilled holes. The orthodox consensus is that they used acid-etching to produce these holes, which seems nearly impossible, when we consider that the holes are smooth-sided, and uniform. They look much more like drill-holes than acid-etched holes. It seems impossible that these were cut even with the use of stone or copper tools. This point alone throws serious doubt on the claim that the peoples of 500 A.D. built this edifice.

What tremendous forces tumbled and scattered these gigantic stones so easily about the site? Many of the blocks (as stated before, many of them weigh upwards of 200 tons) were held together by large copper clamps shaped like an I, rather than interlocking shapes, as at Sacsayhuaman or Macchu Picchu. Others were allegedly held together by silver rivets. The system used here is reminiscent of that used at Dendera, Egypt, or Ankor Wat, Cambodia, or Ollantaytambo, Peru. Most researchers believe that the metal was poured into these shaped-slots carved into the rock whilst molten, as seen in figure 4.

Some of the docks and piers in this area are so large that hundreds of ships could dock comfortably - and at present there is nothing oceanic near these docks except an ancient coastline made of chalky fossils.

Lake Titicaca, languishing miles away, is nearly 30 metres lower than the ruined docks. What tremendous geological upheaval has occurred in the last few thousand years that could have tumbled these huge stones while raising the entire altiplano region three-and-a-half kilometres into the sky? None that anyone knows about at present for certain; but 12,000 years ago might have been a different story.

On the rock cliffs near the piers and warfs of the port area of the ruins are yellow-white calcareous deposits forming long, straight lines indicating pre-historic water levels. These ancient shorelines are strangely tilted, although once they must have been level. The surrounding area is covered with millions of fossilized sea-shells. It appears, from the tilting of the ancient shoreline striations and the abundant presence of fossilized oceanic flora and fauna, that a tremendous uplift of land has taken place sometime in the ancient past.

Figure 4: Example of the joining slots carved into the blocks. It was into these slots that molten metal was poured, then allowed to solidify, in order to join these blocks together.