Which Andean civilization preceded the Inca at Tiwanaku?

The Tiwanaku, whose city stood near Lake Titicaca at nearly 3,900 metres - one of the highest large settlements ever built, in a place where frost can kill a crop in any month of the year.

They farmed it with raised fields separated by water channels. The water absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night, holding the frost off the crops, while the channels grow algae and fish that are dredged back onto the beds as fertiliser. The system was abandoned for a thousand years; experimental reconstruction in the 1980s produced potato yields several times those of modern methods on the same ground, without fertiliser.

The stonework is what draws attention. Blocks weighing many tonnes were cut with flat faces and internal grooves, joined with poured copper cramps, and hauled from quarries tens of kilometres away - which has attracted a durable amount of nonsense about lost technology and ancient astronauts. It was also badly damaged by nineteenth-century looting, railway builders using it as a quarry, and a restoration in the 1960s that rebuilt walls incorrectly out of concrete. The Inca, arriving centuries after its collapse around AD 1000, decided it was where the world had been created.