Pumapunku

16.5617°S, 68.6799°W.

Pumapunku — the Door of the Puma — at Tiwanaku, La Paz Department, Bolivia, immediately southwest of the Akapana pyramid. Construction date approximately 536–600 CE during the height of the Tiwanaku Empire. The structure is a platform pyramid 167 by 117 metres in plan and originally 5 metres tall, faced with the most precisely cut and fitted megalithic masonry surviving from any pre-Columbian culture: andesite and red sandstone blocks weighing up to 130 tonnes, with surfaces dressed flat to within fractions of a millimetre and fitted using H-shaped interlocking joints carved into the adjacent stones. The largest single block weighs approximately 131 tonnes and was transported from a quarry 10 kilometres distant — over a marsh and across a small lake — by methods that have never been adequately reconstructed. Excavated by Bolivian and American missions throughout the twentieth century. The construction technique appears nowhere else in the Americas and is the closest pre-Columbian parallel to the dressed-stone megalithic work of Old World civilisations.

A platform with thirteen-tonne blocks fitted to within hairsbreadth tolerances, by a civilisation whose engineering legacy ended with the empire that produced it.