"One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region.

It is a fascinating story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and then, a century later, by the Spanish Crown. In this book, based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, Charles Stanish brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material that has not previously been published.

This landmark work brings the author's intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on key theoretical issues in evolutionary anthropology."--BOOK JACKET.