Puma Punku is a amazing and mysterious place for many reasons, and yet it is still very unknown compared to other mysterious places like Easter Island or the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Puma Punku is part of a ancient city called Tiwanaku in what is now Bolivia, South America, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. It is not known exactly when Puma Punku was built, some suggest 200 bc, but some claim it is actually thousands of years older, possibly the oldest city on Earth.
Puma Punku seems to have been built for religious reasons though the people left no written record so we cannot be sure. What we can be sure of, is that the people that built Puma Punku had amazing abilities to build things out of huge stones.
Some of the stones in Puma Punku weigh over 100 tons, and they had to be transported over ten miles. Puma Punku is so high in the mountains that trees do not grow and the air is thin. How they moved these giant stones without trees to roll them on or make ropes from is still unknown. Some scientists suggest ropes made of llama skins were used. I wonder if they could have brought the trees from the quarry?
What makes these stones so interesting is just how finely they were worked. Some stones show fine grooves that are accurate to within millimeters. Some stones fit together like puzzle pieces that lock together and stack up to build a wall, the stones are so accurately carved that the pieces can be interchanged for each other. Some scientists say this may be evidence the stones were mass produced.
Another interesting thing to take note of is that many of the stones are made of granite and diorite, these are extremely hard stones and the only stones hard enough to carve them are diamonds. I have heard it explained that you do not necessarily need a harder stone, a softer stone will just take a lot longer. I have also heard of a possibility that the stones were actually softened somehow using chemicals from plants that allowed them to be worked like modern cement and poured into molds.
Softening the stones to make them pour like cement would certainty make it easier to make the fine grooves and notches that are present. Softening the stone would also make it much easier to fit all the blocks together tightly, and to even possibly mass produce giant blocks of stone.
Many of the stone blocks though, are very irregularly shaped suggesting the stones were carved instead of softened. Also, the stoned are different types of rock and even if the people of Puma Punku knew how to soften stone it would be very likely to work only on one type of stone.
Evidence, including ground penetrating radar, suggests that Puma Punku and all of Tiwanaku were built to be quite a spectacle with finely carved stones, complex irrigation systems, temples, meeting places, large developments for housing, and more.
Then as the new Inca began to grow in power they conquered the people of Tiwanaku and all the knowledge of how they had built it was lost.
One more strange fact about the stones at Puma Punku is that, at some point, all the stones seem to be "ripped up" and scattered across the land as if thrown about by some terrible force likely much more powerful than what the Inca were capable.
What happened to these stones?
I give this a 2 on the mystery scale. Let me know what you think.
1 = no mystery
2 = possible mystery
3 = total mystery
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