Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780-1910

8: A Western Mirage on the Bolivian Altiplano

157 Chapter Eight A Western Mirage on the Bolivian Altiplano Robert Bradley About fifteen years ago, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori cited three unrivaled pre-Columbian sites in South America: Machu Picchu, Chavín de Huántar, and Kuelap. Of the three, Kuelap is by far the most neglected by the modern gaze, even though it has been known to the Western world since the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, Hiram Bingham’s lost and misinformed expedition introduced Machu Picchu to the Western world in the early twentieth century. Despite this late entry, Machu Picchu has somehow attracted the lavish attention of almost one million foreign visitors annually. Kuelap, in comparison, receives about one foreign tourist per day. Pre-Columbian scholars not specializing in Inca topics can easily envy Machu Picchu’s popularity. But the attention of the Western world has always been fickle in regard to South America’s aboriginal ruins. For instance, before Machu Picchu gained prominence in the Western imagination, a steady flow of informed European and American travelers made their way to the remote eastern shores of Lake Titicaca. They went there, following an established path, to record the image of a small stone construction from the pre-Hispanic Tiwanaku culture: the Gateway of the Sun. Tiwanaku is the name scholars have given to the people who occupied the Bolivian Altiplano more than thirteen hundred years ago. Tiwanaku culture and language disappeared hundreds of years before the initial contact between 158 Chapter eight the Inca and the Spanish, but ever since the Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León wandered onto the site, Tiwanaku has intrigued the Western imagination . The “golden age” of Tiwanaku tourism began during the late eighteenth century and ended when the ruin was eclipsed by the previously mentioned icon of all South American tourist destinations, Machu Picchu. Today Tiwanaku is still a required stop on any designated circuit of Bolivian attractions , but at present the real aficionados of the ruin are the most diehard of travelers: the archaeologists. Decades of fieldwork at the site have revealed that Tiwanaku masons were masters of stone construction. Indeed, the stone carvings at Tiwanaku are some of the finest in the pre-Columbian Andean region. This is a significant statement when one considers the masonry from the region ’s other famous pre-Columbian cultures: Chavín de Huántar and Tiwantinsuyu (the Inca Empire). Tiwanaku artwork features monoliths in a stylized and oversized human form and clava heads masterfully set in sunken courtyards. But the architectural constructions at Tiwanaku that most piqued the Western imagination were always the carved gateways. The most famous of these gateways was the freestanding post and lintel construction dubbed the Gateway of the Sun (figure 8.1). From a purely visual standpoint, the intense focus on this monument seems somewhat misguided. The Gateway of the Sun was intended to be an entrance for a building. It is all but certain that this stone frame was not discovered in situ, and the original location for the structure has been the focus of intense debate. In addition , the carvings on the left and right sides of the construction are very low relief compared to the deeply incised central imagery; therefore, it is likely that the pre-Columbian Tiwanaku artists never finished this portal.1 But the incomplete condition of the monument has not stopped various individuals from trying to decipher the symbols carved on the gateway. All this interest was assigned to a block-like gray slab doorway. One nineteenth-century traveler , E. George Squire, sought to record the Gateway of the Sun’s features with the greatest care and he gave the dimensions of the gateway in his text as thirteen feet five inches long, seven feet two inches high, and eighteen inches thick.2 Whereas the scale and vertical beauty of Machu Picchu seem to warrant the fame associated with this site, the humble measurements of the Gateway of the Sun, protected now by an unsightly fence of barbed wire, belie the attention this structure has attracted. About twenty years after the conquest of the Inca Empire by Spain, Pedro Cieza de León became the first European visitor to the ruins of Tiwanaku. Although Cieza’s mission was that of a soldier, he wrote a 159 Robert Bradley particularly lucid record of the conquest and its aftermath. But when Cieza was confronted with Tiwanaku he was so dazzled by...