The Stones of the High Plateau. What Mainstream Archaeology Has Settled at Puma Punku - and the Questions That Still Remain - Jonah Carlson

On the high plateau of western Bolivia, 12,600 feet above sea level, the ruins of an ancient ceremonial complex called Puma Punku have, for nearly fifty years, been the centerpiece of the modern alternative-history canon.

The interlocking H-blocks of dark gray andesite, the 131-tonne sandstone slabs, the precision-cut surfaces and drilled holes - the popular literature has, across generations of writers from Erich von Däniken through Graham Hancock to the contemporary YouTube and podcast ecosystem, treated Puma Punku as evidence of impossibly ancient construction, impossibly precise engineering, or impossibly external agency.

In The Stones of the High Plateau, independent researcher Jonah Carlson does something different. He brings the mainstream archaeology of the past three decades to a reader who has encountered the case through the popular framings.

The dating is settled. Multiple converging radiocarbon dates place the earliest Puma Punku construction at approximately 536-600 CE, not the 15,000 BCE that Arthur Posnansky proposed in 1945. The construction precision is largely closed. Jean-Pierre Protzen and Stella Nair's experimental archaeology has demonstrated that the stonework is achievable with documented Tiwanaku-era stone tools - bronze proved ineffective, but flint, agate, jasper, obsidian, and quartzite worked. The architectural plan is substantially recovered. Alexei Vranich's 3D-printing reconstruction methodology has shown the H-blocks to be components of monumental gateways with structural seismic-resistance function. The Tiwanaku culture itself was a major Middle Horizon Andean civilization with a peak urban population of twenty thousand, sophisticated raised-field agriculture, and regional reach across more than a million square kilometers.

Inside this book:

The Tiwanaku built it. We know that now. What we are still recovering is what they built it for.

The Stones of the High Plateau is Book Five of The Impossible Past. The strongest popular framings do not survive. The smaller, more specific questions remain genuinely open.