The Tiwanaku Site Museum is an archaeological museum located in

Tiwanaku, La Paz Tiwanaku is a village and municipality in the La Paz Department, Bolivia. Towards the south of the village, there is the pre-Columbian archaeological site of Tiwanaku. The village has about 1,000 inhabitants, mostly belonging to the Aymara ethnic ...

Bolivia Bolivia, officially the Plurinational State of Bolivia, is a landlocked country located in central South America. The country features diverse geography, including vast Amazonian plains, tropical lowlands, mountains, the Gran Chaco Province, w ...

, near the

Tiwanaku Tiwanaku ( or ) is a Pre-Columbian archaeological site in western Bolivia, near Lake Titicaca, about 70 kilometers from La Paz, and it is one of the largest sites in South America. Surface remains currently cover around 4 square kilometers and in ...

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era, also known as the pre-contact era, or as the pre-Cabraline era specifically in Brazil, spans from the initial peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic to the onset of European col ...

archaeological site. It houses numerous funerary archaeological artifacts, ceramic pieces, and stone sculptures. One of the most important figures in the museum is the

Bennett Monolith The Bennett Monolith is a monumental stone sculpture from the pre-Columbian Tiwanaku civilization, located in present-day Bolivia. Standing approximately 7.3 meters (24 feet) tall and weighing around 20 tons, it is the largest known human-carved ...

, which is the largest

stele A stele ( ) or stela ( )The plural in English is sometimes stelai ( ) based on direct transliteration of the Greek, sometimes stelae or stelæ ( ) based on the inflection of Greek nouns in Latin, and sometimes anglicized to steles ( ) or stela ...

ever found in the Andean world. The building was designed by architect Carlos Villagómez. The inclusion of an open court in the center of the museum was influenced by Tiwanaku design. Since 2000, the site has been managed by the local

Aymara people The Aymara or Aimara (, ) people are an Indigenous people in the Andes and Altiplano regions of South America. Approximately 2.3 million Aymara live in northwest Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. The ancestors of the Aymara lived in the reg ...

. The museum was inaugurated on June 24, 2002.

Gallery

File:Patio_central_museo_Tiahuanacu_.jpg, Center patio File:Tiwanaku08.jpg File:BO_Tihuanako_(149)_(17042408319).jpg,

References

{{Authority control Museums in Bolivia Museums established in 2002

Gallery

See also

References