Abstract

This chapter presents the main recent research advances on Tiwanaku. Due its particular political and religious ideology, this highland culture has stood out for its ability to integrate diverse societies and regions on a scale never seen before in the south-central Andes. Indeed, it exerted an enormous influence and impact on an array of societies, changing and appearing in new forms of relationship among them. From the Late Formative period (200 BC to 500 AD) its power increased in the Titicaca basin until it consolidated around 500 or 600 AD, probably taking advantage of an important population migration from the Taraco Peninsula to the Tiwanaku Valley due to the increase in the lake level, as well as of several persuasive strategies in which the management of ideological power and the economic bases were essential. Its conformation as a state is evidenced in the development of a four-tier hierarchical regional settlement pattern with Tiwanaku at the apex. On a regional scale it is evident that Tiwanaku used religious, political, and economic mechanisms to achieve control and hegemony of the territory with a political geography defined by distance from the core area to distant provinces and peripheries. However, this process was not just one way; local societies had their own agency and took advantage of being part of the Tiwanaku sphere of influence. Here, the nature of this broad phenomenon in diverse regions of the south-central Andes is discussed, giving substance to the period known as the Middle Horizon in Andean archaeology.