Lake Titicaca

Lake Titicaca sits at nearly four thousand metres on the border of Peru and Bolivia, and Andean tradition places the origin of the world's order there.

In the Inca account recorded by colonial chroniclers, the creator brought the sun, moon and stars out of the lake or from the Island of the Sun within it, and sent the first Inca and his sister northward from there to found Cusco, carrying a golden rod that would sink into the ground where they were to settle. Versions differ in detail between the chroniclers, which is itself informative: Betanzos, Cobo and Garcilaso de la Vega were recording material from different informants at different removes, and the Inca state had reasons to standardise an origin story that grounded its dynasty in the most sacred lake in the region.

The Island of the Sun carried a major shrine complex, with a sacred rock, a temple and accommodation for pilgrims who came from across the empire, and the pilgrimage was managed as a state undertaking with progressive stages of purification along the route.

The lake was there long before the Inca, and so was its sanctity. The Inca claim on it is best read as the annexation of an existing sacred centre by a state that needed one, which is a pattern their administration repeated across the Andes, incorporating regional shrines and their staff into an imperial system rather than suppressing them.

On the lake's southern shore stand the remains of Tiwanaku, a ceremonial centre that flourished for centuries before the Inca and that gave the region its most studied ritual architecture.

Its sunken court, lined with tenoned stone heads in a range of styles, its Gate of the Sun carved from a single block with a central staff-bearing figure surrounded by winged attendants, and its platform mounds have been excavated and argued over since the nineteenth century. The staff-bearing figure recurs across a very wide area of the Andes over a long period, which is one of the principal pieces of evidence for a shared religious iconography spanning several cultures.

Tiwanaku has also been used politically. Its stonework was appropriated for nationalist argument in the twentieth century, and the inauguration of Evo Morales as president of Bolivia in 2006 included a ceremony conducted there by Aymara ritual specialists, deliberately preceding the constitutional ceremony in La Paz.

The lake itself remains in ritual use. Aymara and Quechua communities on both shores make offerings to Pachamama and to the local mountain lords, burying or burning prepared bundles at the appropriate times of year, and the practice is ordinary rather than antiquarian. Underwater survey has recovered offerings deposited in the lake at ritual sites, including gold, shell and animal remains, showing the same practice running back well over a thousand years.