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Pseudo-Archaeology as State Supported Science: Hörbiger, Posnansky, Kiss and the Ahnenerbe

Expedition to Tiwanaku, Bolivia


Dr Graham Holton

What is Pseudo-Archaeology?1
The history of science in the past has often been written as a progressivist account in
which science establishes the truth, debunking theories mired in outmoded thinking, not blinkered
by social prejudice and a priori assumptions. This is far from the truth, as established by Peter J.
Riggs’ Whys & Ways of Science (1992), Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch’s The Golem (1993), and
Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson in Servants of Nature (1999). Theories are often
accepted by reason of the force of personalities and international politics rather than by logic and
evidence. This is especially so when pseudo-scientific theories are supported by the state. The
genre of pseudo-archaeology, in which ideology is put forward as science, lacks the logical
argument and scientific proof established through scientific stringent analysis and the integrity
that comes from archaeological empirical testing and observations made at the site. Yet this
new paradigm becomes established orthodoxy by its support by the state and its institutions.
Without this support of the state, mainstream historians and scientists call the pseudo-scientific
views of dissent ‘crackpot’, a term derived from old Viking kraka meaning ‘crow’ and
medieval English potte, meaning a ‘hollow’. Crackpot conjures up an image of dissenters
huddled together like crows, uttering senseless squawks. Stephen Williams, more kindly calls
this genre ‘fantastic archaeology’, rather than the more pejorative term ‘pseudo-archaeology’,
because ‘pseudo’ expresses the dominance of an academia that insists on it own interpretation of
the past.2

Martin Gardener in Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957) found that many
pseudo-scientists and crank historians worked in isolation, and claim that they are forced to do so
because of the prejudice of mainstream science.3 Pseudo-scientists are not interested in empirical
methods, but allow the facts to speak for themselves. The writer of crank histories has usually
read voluminous material in a discipline in which they are not trained, giving masses of detail,
assuming that quantity of facts by itself establishes proof, while ignoring the logic of their
arguments. Aaron Elkins writes that there is an ‘amazing capacity of even the most learned
experts to turn into gullible chumps if they want to believe something.’4 Bergan Evan writes in
his The Natural History of Nonsense that:

Fallacy is always the product of certain processes in popular thinking: of arguing from
negatives and analogies, of making false generalizations, or worshipping coincidence, of
taking rhetoric for fact, of never questioning, or even perceiving the underlying
conceptions that make for prejudice, and, above all, of a romantic delight in the
wonderful for its own sake. And once made, the error… is likely to owe its vitality to
intellectual currents and social forces with which, superficially regarded, it has no
seeming connection.5

Crackpots may use esoteric sources and distort mainstream science to prove their theory.
Many crank histories are highly complex and jargon-filled. Too often pseudo-scientists practice
a complex argument but fail to organize their thoughts into any form of coherent argument,
thereby disallowing the reader an easy access to their arguments. The possession of a secret
1
I wish to thank Dr Heidi Zogbaum for correcting my German translations and Mark Curran for photocopying
relevant material from libraries in Zurich, Switzerland.
2
Stephen Williams, Fantastic Archaeology: The Wild Side of North American Prehistory, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
3
Martin Gardener, Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science, New York: Dover, 1957.
4
Aaron Elkins, Skeleton Dance, New York: Avon Books, 2000, p. 124.
5
Bergan Evan, The Natural History of Nonsense, New York: Vintage Books, 1958, p. 251.

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intensifies the sense of special individuality for followers of the genre. This lack of evidence has
led critics of the genre to refer to the writers of the wildest ideas as crank scientists, charlatans
and frauds. For all the attacks against it, and despite the strenuous efforts by archaeologists to
convince the public that crank history and pseudo-archaeology are filled with blatant errors,
pseudo-archaeology is still more widely read than academic works. Robert Wauchope of
Chicago University writes: ‘It chagrins the professional scholar, whose books are usually
subsidized because they find no popular market, that small fortunes are made by the publishers
and authors of mystical nonsense.’6 While scientists refer to such writers as Edmund Kiss, H.S.
Bellamy and P. Allen, Erich von Däniken, Zecaria Sitchin, and Graham Hancock as crackpot, their
fans see them as ‘alternative archaeologists’.

While Martin Gardiner, Stephen Williams, Sprague de Camp, Robert Wauchope, Brian
Fagan, William Rathje and Michael Schiffer treat pseudo-archaeology as a serious threat to
mainstream history and science, they fail to see the full implication of the racist assumptions so
often employed by this genre. Robert Sharer and Wendy Ashmore saw Diffusionism as robbing
‘humanity of the real achievements of past cultures,’7 but miss the important consequence of such
beliefs. The social and political exploitation of archaeology for racist means has meant that
pseudo-archaeology supports the cultural genocide of the Indigenous in the Americas.8 Few
critics have attacked the genre for its race-based assumptions, which deny any indigenous role
in their reconstructions of the prehistoric past. Christopher Hale rightly points out in Himmler’s
Crusade (2004), that although authors of pseudo-archaeology may not be racist: ‘the persistence
of these bogus visions of the past cannot be treated as foolish diversions or harmless fantasy; they
emerge from a long and dangerous history, and in different circumstances might turn into a
slippery slope, descending into darkness.’9 Crank archaeology is far from harmless when it is used
by the state as part of its ideology of racial determinism and denies the Indigenous people their
human rights.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm argues that in constructing the ideology of the state,
history: ‘[It] is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been
selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function is to do
so.’10 How the state represented the past shaped the nation’s understanding of the ‘Other’. The
past is the present reconstructed to give meaning to the collated data of the past, based on
analogies of the way the state perceives national history. Museums in Bolivia, originally set up
from Arthur Posnansky’s collections, were established within a framework of institutionalized
academic foundations, given financial support, and a body of legislation to protect antiquities by
the Bolivian government. The pseudo-archaeology of Posnansky and Kiss is not harmless, for it
deliberately rewrites the prehistoric past to remove the part played by the Indigenous in the rise of
civilization in Bolivia, which has led to cultural genocide and the removal of land rights.11

This paper examines the early history of German archaeologists in Bolivia and how their
reputation of scientific excellence was overridden during the 1920s and 1930s by German pseudo-
scientists, who relied upon Hyper-diffusionism (only Aryans were capable of inventing
civilization), racial determinism, and crackpot cosmological theories. The pseudo-scientific
6
Robert Wauchope, Lost Tribes and Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians,
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962, p. 135.
7
Williams, Fantastic Archaeology, pp. 7-9.
8
P. Stone and R. MacKenzie, The Excluded Past: Archaeology in Education, London: Unwin Hyman, 1990, p.
xxiii.
9
Christopher Hale, Himmler’s Crusade: The True Story of the 1938 Nazi Expedition into Tibet, London: Bantam
Books, 2004, p. 539.
10
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, The Invention of
Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 13-14.
11
See José Antonio Lucero, Voice of Struggle: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes,
Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh, 2008; Nikolas Kozloff, Revolution! South America and the Rise of the
New Left, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008.

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theories of Posnansky were supported by Bolivia’s white ruling elite, who ruled the indigenous
people with violent repression, because Posnansky’s findings supported the racial ideology of the
state.12 Kiss was supported by the Nazi institution, the Ahnenerbe, because of his findings that
Tiwanaku was Nordic and his theories supported Hans Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, a pseudo-
science that Adolf Hitler heavily supported. German pseudo-archaeologists culminated in the
Ahnenerbe’s plans for a major expedition to Bolivia in 1939 to find proof for Hörbiger’s theories.
This case study of the use of pseudo-science of Bolivia’s Tiwanaku shows the importance of the
role of the state, through its ideology and institutions, in the acceptance of pseudo-science.
Archaeologists compromised their academic objectivity by accepting pseudo-science, in which
the state manipulated the past for political ends, to ensure career opportunities.

Early Expeditions to Tiwanaku


The Andes enters Bolivia as two distinct mountain chains ascending from the north, the
eastern range, the Cordillera Real, and to the west, the Cordillera Occidental. Sandwiched
between these cordilleras is an immense 3,800 metre high plateau, the altiplano, a cold,
windswept treeless plain where the corolla flower gives the colours of Bolivia’s national flag, red
and yellow. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the Ice Age, a great body of fresh water, Lake
Ballivan, began to dry up. The lake’s remnants are scattered across the Altiplano as a series of
mud and salt flats, freshwater lakes, and lagoons. The largest of these lakes is Titicaca, the highest
navigable freshwater lake in the world, an enormous dark blue body of water covering 8,100
square kilometres, measuring 176 kilometres in length and 56 kilometres at its widest. The
Conquistadors had named the Lake Chucuito after an ancient Aymará town on its western shore.
On the Island of the Sun there is a sacred rock that looked like a puma’s head, called Titi, meaning
in Aymará ‘wildcat’, and Kaka ‘rock’. With time the name Titi Kaka was extended from the rock
to the island, and finally to the lake itself. Lake Titicaca is surrounded by terraced fields that cease
abruptly at 4,200 metre, the snow line and the upper limit of cultivation in the desolate puna.
Above this height only the coriaceous grass, ichu, grows. The wet season brings frequent
torrential rainstorms that flood the valleys; the wind scything across the lake’s surface creates
waves large enough to sink a small boat. In winter snow covers the surrounding peaks and frost
blankets the valley. Because of climate, elevation and topography maize cannot grow here, and
even the hardy potato crop may be severely subject to frost. It is this bleak environment that has
been the cause of so many questions of how a great civilization could arise here without outside
origins.

To overcome the restrictions of the physical extremes of the altiplano, an ingenious


system of irrigated terraces erected by the first Bronze Age civilization of the Americas,
Tiwanaku, allowed the expansion of the ancient civilizations to nurture the food staples of potato,
oca, ulluco, mashiva, quinoa and caniuva. Thirty kilometres inland from Lake Titicaca is the
village of Tiahuanaco, where the only thing of note is a cathedral. Every stone of which was
carried from the nearby ruins of Tiwanaku, built upon the foundations of an ancient temple,13 as
was the custom of the Catholic Church to quicken the process of conversion. The custom dates
back to Pope Gregory, who wrote to Abbot Mellitus and St Augustine in 601 A.D. that pagan
temples ought not to be destroyed, but purified and converted to churches. The village is aligned
to the north, with the main street leading south from the cathedral to the pyramid of Puma Punku
in Tiwanaku. The craftsmanship of the architectural and engineering achievements was founded
upon the city’s great wealth derived from rich mineral deposits mined in the region.

The Conquest had destroyed much of Quechua and Aymará culture and oral history,
with Tiwanaku’s history reissued to satisfy the glorification of the white race over the
Amerindian. The original chroniclers of the Collao - Bernabé Cobo, Pedro de Cieze de León,
12
See Herbert S. Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, New York: Oxford University Press,
1982.
13
Personal communication with Professor A.L. Kolata, August 1986.

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Juan de Betanzos, and Antonio de la Calancha - believed that these ruins were not built by the
‘miserable Indians’ found nearby, but was a metropolis of exotic origin. Much of the problem of
identifying any legitimate history for Tiwanaku, was that so much had been destroyed long before
the Conquest. The Spanish found a city in historical amnesia eighty years after the Inca
conquest. The Incas retold the oral history of conquered regions to show that no great
civilization had existed before them.14 Such was the mystery of who built Tiwanaku that the
Bostonian lawyer turned historian, William Hickling Prescott, wrote in his classic History of the
Conquest of Peru (1847):

We may reasonably conclude that there existed in the country a race advanced in civilization
before the time of the Incas and in conformity with nearly every tradition, we may derive
this race from the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca; a conclusion strongly confirmed by the
imposing architectural remains which still endure after the lapse of so many years on its
borders. Who this race was and whence they came may afford a tempting theme that lies far
beyond the domains of history.15

Sixty years later Sir Clements R. Markham, the president of London’s Royal Geographical
Society, could write in his The Incas of Peru (1910), that: ‘the enigma [of Tiwanaku] still
defies explanation.’16 ‘[I]f stones could speak, [they] would reveal a story of the deepest
interest.’17

Independence from Spain saw an opening up of Upper Peru (Bolivia) to scientific


expeditions. In 1826 the French scientist Alcides Dessalines d’Orbigny (1802-1857) spent eight
years studying the fauna, flora, geology and ethnology of Bolivia, which he published in nine large
volumes, Voyage dans l’ Amérique mèridionale, 1826-1833. In it he gives only a brief description
of the desolate remains of Tiwanaku, seemingly little impressed, as his sketches of the massive
statues are unreliable.18 Directly south of the village church and 900 metres south-west of the
Pyramid of Akapana, lies the amazing pyramid of Puma Punku, the Gate of the Puma, formerly
known as Punca Punku, ‘Ten Gates’. This remarkable edifice was still largely intact when
d’Orbigny visited the site, but soon afterwards workmen: ‘[u]nable to remove the massive stones
composing the base of what was called the “Hall of Justice,” they mined them and blew them up
with gunpowder, removing many of the elaborately-cut fragments to pave the cathedral of La
Paz.’19 Enough remains, nevertheless, to prove the general accuracy of d’Orbigny’s plan.

In the 1890s an estimated 500 train-loads of stones from the ancient city were carted away
by the British contractors of the railway to build bridges and station houses along the line from La
Paz to Lake Titicaca, as it was a cheaper source of rock than mining the nearby sandstone
quarries. Smaller carved pieces were removed by the villagers, whose humble dwellings now
contain beautifully cut stone lintels, jambs, seats, tables and water receptacles. Huge stones lay
scattered across an area of several square kilometres, the rest has been long carted away to
construct the government buildings in La Paz, the capital of this landlocked republic. Bryce found
that if: ‘there ever was a city at Tiahuanaco there is nothing to shew… The sight of this mass of
ruins, where hardly one stone is left upon another in a place where thousands of men must have
toiled and many thousands have worshipped, makes its melancholy landscape all the more doleful.

14
Thomas C. Patterson, ‘The Inca Empire and Its Subject Peoples’, in John E. Kicza (ed.), The Indian in Latin
American History: Resistance, Resilience, and Acculturation, Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc.,
Revised Edition, 2000, pp. 5-6.
15
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1893, pp. 8-9.
16
C.R. Markham, The Incas of Peru, Lima, Peru: ABC, (1910) 1977, p. 21.
17
Ibid., p. 23.
18
A.D. D’Orbigny, Voyage dans l’ Amérique mèridionale, 1826-1833, Vol. 4 (9 volumes), Paris, 1835-1847. Vol. 2
deals with the Collao.
19
A. Stübel, and M. Uhle, Die Ruinenstaette von Tiahuanaco im hochland des Alten Peru, Berlin, 1892.

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It recalls the descriptions in the Hebrew prophets of the desolation coming upon Nineveh.’20 This
abysmal destruction of one of the most remarkable achievements of ancient South America, by
engineers of the world’s greatest imperial power and the national government shows the
indifference then held towards the indigenous past.

Ephraim George Squier (1821-1888), the first ‘dirt’ archaeologist of the United States,
through the influence of William Hickling Prescott, obtained an appointment as U.S. chargé
d’affaires in Central America in 1849, where he studied the local antiquities, and in 1852 wrote the
two volumed Nicaragua: Its People, Scenery, Monuments. Suffering from deteriorating health
President Lincoln appointed Squier Commissioner of the United States at Lima. The position
enabled him to travel for eighteen months around Peru surveying and carrying out archaeological
digs. He photographed the hundreds of ancient remains he came upon, transporting the
photographic plates and developing chemicals on horseback. In June 1864, after an arduous
journey, Squier spent a week at Tiwanaku to conduct the first accurate survey of the site. The
magnificence of this archaeological wonder so inspired him that he later called the ruins, ‘The
Baalbec of the New World’, revealing to the American public these marvels through the illustrated
pages of Harpers New Monthly Magazine (May 1868).

Beginning in the 1850s, the Classificatory-Descriptive Period in American archaeology


focused on the description of archaeological materials and the rudimentary classification of
architecture and monuments in the endeavour of making the new science a systematic discipline.
In Bolivia and Peru amongst the best works were by von Tschüdi,21 Castelnau,22 Markham, 23
Squier,24 Wiener,25 Reiss and Stübel,26 Middendorf,27 Bergt, 28 Uhle,29 Bandelier,30 von
Nordenskiöld, 31 and Schmidt.32 Max Uhle was born in Germany and had a degree in archaeology
and ethnography. While a director of the Dresden Museum Uhle gained a commanding knowledge
of Tiahuanaco and Inca style potteries and sculptural styles. He met Alphons Stübel who had just
excavated the ancient cemetery at Ancon on the Peruvian coast with Wilheim Reiss. Uhle
collaborated with Stübel to write Die Ruinenstaette von Tiahuanaco im hochland des Alten Peru
in 1892. The German archaeologists had carried out the most accurate scientific analysis of the
carved stones of the ruins of Tiwanaku, supported with superb photographs and accurate
measurements. Uhle returned to the Collao two years later to develop a system of regional
classification based on pottery types, and continued to work in South America for over thirty
years, mainly in Peru and Bolivia. Uhle applied seriational and limited methods across a limited
geographical area to build up a chronological sequence from pottery styles and burial goods.33 By
World War I there was no one else in South America with Uhle’s sophistication and scientific
20
James Bryce, South America: Observations and Impressions, New York: MacMillan, 1912, pp. 147-148.
21
Johann J. von Tschüdi, Travels in Peru, during the Years 1838-1842, London: D. Bogue, 1847; J.J. von
Tschüdi, Reisen Durch Süd-Amerika, 5 vols., Leipzig, 1869.
22
Francis de Castelnau, Expédition dans les Parties Centrales de l’Amérique du Sud, Troisième Partie:
Antiquítes des Incas et Autres peoples Anciens, Paris, 1854.
23
Clements R. Markham, Cuzco: a journey to the ancient capital of Peru, London, 1856.
24
E.G. Squier, ‘Among the Andes of Peru and Bolivia’, Harpers New Monthly Magazine, vol. XXXVI, No.
CCXV, April 1868.
25
Charles Wiener, Pérou et Bolivia, Paris, 1880.
26
Wilhelm Reiss and Alphons Stübel, The Necropolis of Ancón in Peru, 3 vols., Berlin, 1880-7.
27
Middendorf, E.W., Peru, 3 vols., Berlin, 1893-5.
28
W. Bergt, ‘Die Gesteine der Rüinenstatte von Tiahuanaco im alten Peru (Bolivia)’, Abhandlungen der
naturwissenschaftlichen Geesellschaft, Isis, Abh. 5, Dresden, 1894, pp. 35-52.
29
Max Uhle, Pachacamac, Philadelphia, 1903.
30
Adolph F. Bandelier, The Islands of Titicaca and Koati, New York, 1910.; ‘The Ruins at Tiahuanaco’,
Proceedingsof the American Antiquarian Society, Vol. 21, Part 1, Worcester, 1911.
31
Erland von Nordenskiöld, ‘Urnengräber und Mounds im Bolivianischen Flachlande,’ Bassler Archives, vol. 3,
Berlin, 1913, pp. 205-55.
32
Max Schmidt, Kunst und Kultur von Peru, Berlin: Propylaen, 1929.
33
Gordon R. Wiley and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, London: Thames and Hudson,
1974, p. 74.

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abilities. The first modern systematic excavations, art analyses, interpretations of the site, and
dating the culture were published in Adolf Bandelier’s The Islands of Titicaca and Koati (1910),
followed in 1932 with excavations by the noted archaeologist Wendell C. Bennett. Bennett
conceded for pushing the age of Tiwanaku back to the beginning of the first millennium B.C., but
anything older was highly unlikely.34 By the 1920s German archaeologists were at the fore of
South American archaeology, especially of the ruins of Tiwanaku [formerly Tiahuanaco].35
Archaeology began to be taught in universities that produced professionally trained graduates
much influenced by the European school, then following E.B. Tylor’s Diffusionism,36 and the
excavation methods introduced by Flinders Petrie.37 This reputation of scientific excellence began
to change when German pseudo-archaeologists used Diffusionism, racial determinism, and
crackpot cosmological theories culminating in the Ahnenerbe’s plans for a major expedition to
Bolivia in 1939.

The Ahnenerbe and Hans Hörbiger’s Welteislehre


When the historian of archaeology, Leonard Cottrell, visited Charvati, near the famous
Bronze Age archaeological site of Mycenae in southern Greece, after World War II, he was
surprised to find the signatures of many high-ranking Nazi officials in the little inn’s registry.
Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, and scores of officers and troops from
the Panzerdivisionen had come to pay homage to the great discovery of the German
millionaire and archaeologist, Dr Heinrich Schliemann.38 The Nazis saw the Mycenaeans as
blond-haired and blue-eyed and Classical antiquity as the creation of the Aryan race. Wilhelm
Sieglin (1855-1935), professor of Historical Geography in Berlin, searched the Classical
sources for all references to blond hair to show the great influence of the Nordic race in
antiquity. The famed anthropologist Friedrich Karl Günther (1891-1968) took the same
approach using archaeology to support Hitler’s and the Nazi party’s views on racial hierarchy.
Such archaeological findings were based on the race-historical ideas of Arthur de Gobineau
and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), and the anti-Semitic race mysticism of Lanz
von Liebenfels (1874-1954) and Guido von List (1848-1919).

While Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was in prison, after the failed Munich putsch attempt in
1923, he used Hans F.K. Günther’s Racial Typology of the German People and Henry Ford’s The
International Jew to write his Mein Kampf. When a reporter asked Hitler why a portrait of Ford
was prominently displayed in his office, he replied: ‘I regard Ford as my inspiration.’39 Under the
ultra-nationalism of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), these racist works
were quickly adapted for political ends.40 The most comprehensive work of Ersatz prehistory in
Nazi Germany was ‘Hitler’s Stonehenge’ built in 1935 on the orders of Heinrich Himmler
(1900-1945). This massive megalithic monument to paganism, comprising 4,500 standing
stones, was constructed near Verden in Lower Saxony, and when completed Himmler
conducted solstice ceremonies in front of 10,000 followers.41 In 1940, Hans Reinerth’s
Prehistory of German Races argued that German racial superiority gave modern Germany the
right to take over any territory on which the German race had once lived. Evidence of

34
Wendell Bennett, ‘Excavations at Tiahuanaco’, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural
History, 34, New York: American Museum of Natural History, Vol. xxxiv, No. 3, 1934, pp. 359-494.
35
For a history of the archaeology of Tiwanaku see, Carlos Ponce Sangines and G. Mogrovejo Terrazas, Acerca
de la Procedencia del material lítico de los monumentos Tiwanaku, La Paz: Academia Nacional de Ciencias de
Bolivia, Publicación No. 21, 1970, pp. 13-65.
36
E.B. Tylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilisation, London: Macmillan, 1881.
37
W.M.F. Petrie, Tell el-Hesy (Lachish), London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1891.
38
L. Cottrell, The Bull of Minos, London: Pan, 1961, p. 20.
39
Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life, London: The Bodley Head,
2009, p.71
40
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, London: Pan Books, 2000, pp. 9-14, 83-84.
41
P.G. Bahn (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology, London: BCA, 1996, p. 216.

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occupational sites was looked for throughout Europe, to justify Nazi expansionist policy and
the occupation of foreign countries.42

Archaeology had become degraded by the perpetrators of race history and the political
assumptions of racial superiority.43 The Aryan model championed the Greeks as Aryans, with
little Egyptian or Levantine influence, the earliest ancestors of Western civilization. These racist
attitudes, which had evolved from the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century, denied
any contribution by the African race to civilization. After the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars, Prussia became the dominant German state and the focus of German
nationalism, with Alexander von Humboldt and Berthold Niebuhr establishing a new university
system Philologie der Altertumswissenschaft (Science of Antiquity). It was based on a system of
meritocratic networks of student-teacher relationships, seminars and professional journals. At the
core of this new movement was the image of the Greek as both artistic and philosophical. Niebuhr
introduced Romanticism and racism into the writing of ancient history, and placed Egypt in an
inferior position to European culture. The seeds of racial totalitarianism were sown in Germany
with its colonies in Africa and Melanesia of 1885, and anti-black hostility when French African
troops were stationed in the Rhineland in 1918.44

German archaeology and its views on racial ideology were developed from national
romantic Vaterländische Altertumskunde (patriotic antiquarianism) and prehistoric
anthropology. The anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) had used the
concept of the ‘Caucasian race’, which was then developed by Gustav Schwantes (1881-1960)
to describe how a ‘Nordic race, toughened by a merciless environment’ was now deciding ‘the
world politics of Europe’.45 Chamberlain made the continuity of race as an historical principle
popular. Virchow initiated a general examination of eye, hair and skin colors of German
schoolchildren to show that the majority of the population fitted the German stereotype.
Besides stature, blond hair, blue eyes and long skulls were characteristic of the German type.
Alexander Ecker (1816-1887) was among the first to use this latter characteristic to prove the
German type in skeletons recovered in archaeological digs.

In Nazi Germany, prehistorians and archaeologists compromised their academic


objectivity as followers of Gustaf Kossina, in which career opportunities were made by
manipulating the past for political ends.46 Two party institutions organized German research
into prehistory in competition with each other. The Ahnenerbe (Heritage of the Forefathers)
was headed by the security-chief, Reichsfuehrer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. The propaganda office,
Amt Rosenberg, of the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), with Hans Reinerth
(1900-1990), headed the Confederation for German Prehistory, which reinterpreted the past
for political and nationalistic ends.47

Himmler founded in 1935 the Ahnenerbe, meaning Inheritance from the Ancestors, as an
elite Nazi research institute to find evidence of Germanic cultural accomplishments in prehistory,
and support Hitler’s race supremacy theories. The organization was an integral part of the SS,

42
I. Wiwjorra, ‘German Archaeology and its Relation to Nationalism and Racism’, in M. Díaz-Andreu and T.
Champion (eds), Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe, London: UCL Press, 1996.
43
W.J. McCann, ‘”Volk und Germanentum”: the presentation of the past in Nazi Germany’, in P. Gathercole
and D. Lowenthal (eds), The Politics of the Past, London: Routledge, 1994, pp.74-88.
44
Robert W. Kestling, ‘Blacks Under the Swastika: A Research Note’, The Journal of Negro History, Vol.
LXXXIII, No. 1 (Winter 1998), pp. 84-105.
45
Quoted by I. Wiwjorra, ‘German Archaeology and its Relation to Nationalism and Racism’, in M. Díaz-
Andreu and T. Champion (eds), Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe, London: UCL Press, 1996, p. 178.
46
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991.
47
Bettina Arnold, ‘The Past as Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany,’ Antiquity, 64 (1990),
pp. 464-478.

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equipped with libraries, workshops and laboratories.48 The Ahnenerbe had as its official mission
the recovery of evidence to prove Nordic dominance in the ancient past, and to convey these
findings to the German people, especially through its journal Germanien. Despite its scientific
façade, Himmler directed its race-based research into often bizarre directions. He believed that the
Nordic race had not evolved but descended from Heaven to occupy the continent of Atlantis.
From there they emigrated to found the ancient city of Obo in Central Asia. In 1937 the
Ahnenerbe Foundation received 50,000 Reichmarks in donations from businesses, including
Daimler-Benz and Bayrische Motorwerke (BMW). By 1939 the Ahnenerbe employed 137
German academics and scientists. Himmler saw the research funded by the Ahnenerbe as essential
for the future of the Reich, yet Hitler took little interest in the institute and its Germanic
archaeology, much preferring the architectural achievements of Classical Greece and Rome. ‘I
cannot help remembering that’, he declared, ‘while our ancestors were making these vessels of
stone and clay, over which our archaeologists rave, the Greeks had already built an Acropolis.’49
What Himmler needed was a major discovery to grab Hitler’s attention - Hans Hörbiger.

Hitler had long been a follower of Hans Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, World Ice Theory. ‘I’m
quite well inclined to accept the cosmic theories of Hörbiger’, he commented one night to guests
before launching into an explanation of Hörbiger’s bizarre theories.50 Hörbiger, who was to
influence Adolf Hitler’s pseudo-scientific and race theories, argued that when the Earth’s third
moon had disintegrated along a parabola, it collided with the Earth to cause the Biblical Diluvium,
which left mineral deposits scattered across the crust of the Earth. This moon’s gravitational pull
created a gigantic equatorial tide that forced mankind to inhabit the highest peaks, where they
founded a worldwide maritime civilization. Immediately before this Tertiary cataclysm the Andes
of South America and the Mexican highlands were free from ice allowing the development of high
civilizations. Since the area around Lake Titicaca was once called Tahuantinsuyu, the ‘union of
nations’, Hörbiger considered Bolivia and Peru worthy of deeper investigation to prove his
Welteislehre. Whilst the strange ruins of the Collao were the post-biblical flood buildings of a
primitive but intelligent culture, the subterranean ruins would prove to be far older than the
present Sun. For according to legend the area was, ‘a land before the Sun appeared in the
heavens.’51

The Austrian engineer, Hans Hörbiger, invented a system of pump valves, netting him a
fortune when he sold the patent to major German and American manufacturers in 1894. Hörbiger
was also an amateur cosmologist with a special interest in the physics of what happens to water
when it goes through its phase changes from ice to vapor. From this, he believed that he could
explain the physics of the cosmos by understanding the physical forces that accompanied these
changes, as the eternal struggle in infinite space between fire and ice. The physical forces of
Hörbiger’s Universe are a bizarre combination of repulsion and attraction of fire and ice,
formulated after a tremendous explosion witnessed when he dropped molten metal onto ice. The
massive build up of energy during the sudden phase change from ice to steam created a
spectacular reaction. Based on this observation Hörbiger produced a model of the cosmos calling
for immense hot bodies, millions of times larger than the Sun, to collide with gigantic bodies of
ice, initiating tremendous explosions millions of years ago. This sequence of violent reactions
activated the birth of the planets of the Solar System. The Moon, Jupiter and Saturn are remnants
of this ice and sunspots occur when ice falls from Jupiter and plunges into the superheated surface
of the Sun. According to Hörbiger’s theory, the Milky Way does not consist of millions of stars,
48
See Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust, London: Harper Perennial,
2006, pp. 1-13; John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science and the Devil’s Pact, London: Penguin, 2004, pp.
191-197.
49
Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944, H.R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), London: Phoenix Press, 2000, No. 253,
p. 568.
50
Ibid., no. 125, p. 249.
51
Quoted in R. Bowen, Universal Ice: Science and Ideology in the Nazi State, London: Belhaven Press, 1993,
p. 57.

8
but is an enormous band of ice through which starlight appears to shine. This ice lies beyond the
Sun at three times the distance from Earth to Neptune. Each planet (ice) of the Solar System
performs a slowly shrinking spiral into the Sun (fire), to collide eventually with the Sun igniting
another explosion in which the whole process of the creation of a new planetary system begins
again. Hörbiger was sixty-five years old when Philipp Fauth co-published an 800-page book, The
Glacial Cosmogony of Hörbiger (1913), in which Hörbiger postulates his Welteislehre to explain
the workings of the cosmos. This tension between the opposing forces of repulsion and attraction
determined all life on the planet, and therefore human destiny. A succession of violent cataclysms
on Earth, and in the cosmos, had caused mutations in the cyclic process that affected Mankind’s
evolutionary path, with the rise and fall of fabulous civilizations millions of years before our own
rise to civilization.

Hörbiger’s amalgam of Nordic mythology and pseudo-science reintroduced a tradition of


beliefs held in prophecies, myths and legends that contradicted the tenets of what the Nazis called
Jewish-Liberal science. Hörbiger’s theory, corroborated by European mythology, lay in stark
contradiction with academic astronomy and astrophysics. The Eddas were an important element
of the mystical side of Nazi thought, and with the Aryan origin myths, were integrated with
Welteislehre to revive Nordic mythology as a surrogate religion to replace Christianity, which
worshipped a Jewish Messiah.52 Hörbiger argued that the Eddas are based on fact, as put forward
by Wilhelm Aspendorf in The Edda as World Ice Theory (1933). The Eddas consist of a body of
ancient Icelandic literature contained in two thirteenth-century books, the Prose (Younger) Edda
and the Poetic (Elder) Edda. The Prose Edda was written by the Icelandic Chief Judge, poet and
historian, Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), as a text book for instructing young poets in the
complicated meters of early Icelandic skalds (court poems), enabling them to understand earlier
mythology. The Poetic Edda is the oldest surviving poem of Germanic legend, the core of the
medieval epic called the Nibelungenlied. Many were written down between 800 and 1000 A.D.,
marking the end of Europe’s Dark Ages.53

German geologists presented evidence of a very strong disturbance in the climatic


collapse, Klimasturz, before the International Geological Congress in Stockholm in 1910 that
catastrophic fluctuations had occurred in the Earth’s climate in the past few thousand years.
Brooks gives evidence in Climate Through the Ages that these post-glacial geologic changes in
Europe were contemporaneous with proto-historical Egypt.54 Hörbiger’s Welteislehre theory
explained these changes as major leaps in the history of the geological and biological evolution on
Earth caused by a succession of lunar collisions, of which there have been four geological epochs.
The Quaternary is the age of the fourth moon, our present epoch. Each previous planetoid of
cosmic ice takes hundreds of thousands of years to spiral into the Earth, which caused the great
extinctions. As the body approached, a massive tidal bulge drowned the equatorial regions. The
moon’s increasing proximity to Earth increased gravitational forces, mutating creatures to an
immense size, such as the dinosaurs and the megafauna (giant mammals), which became extinct at
the end of the Cretaceous and the Pleistocene respectively, during two previous moons’ collisions.
Reduced cloud cover allowed a massive increase in cosmic radiation causing genetic mutations
that altered the course of evolution to bring forth new species to inhabit the devastated planet.
This is why the remnant fauna and flora after each cataclysm are far different and smaller than the
giants that preceded them. Our present moon will also plunge into the Earth’s surface, and what
humanity survives will evolve into a superior race, to found an even mightier civilization than our
own. Finally, Mars will pass near the Earth dragging its atmosphere into space before spinning off
to collide with the Sun, leading to the final extinction of humanity.
52
Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp. 255-261; Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939, London:
Penguin, 2006, pp. 250-253; Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity,
1919-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 101-104, 126-127.
53
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, pp. 154-163.
54
C.E.P. Brooks, Climate Through the Ages: A Study of the Climatic Factors and Their Variations, New York:
McGraw-Hill Books Co., Rev. ed. 1949, p. 281.

9
When scientists in Germany and Austria attacked Hörbiger’s cosmogony, they received an
ultimatum in the mail: ‘The time has come for you to choose - whether to be with us or against
us. While Hitler is cleaning up politics, Hans Hörbiger will sweep out of the way the bogus
sciences. The doctrine of eternal ice will be a sign of the regeneration of the German people.
Beware! Come over to our side before it is too late!’55 Known as the ‘two Austrians’, Hörbiger
lectured Adolf Hitler on his Welteislehre, telling him that Germany was being poisoned by Western
sciences, such as psychoanalysis, serology, relativity and conventional astronomy. According to
Hermann Rauschning, the Governor of Danzig, Hörbiger told Hitler to ‘shut up!’ when he was
explaining his complex theories to him.56 With the considerable funds at his disposal, as well as
Hitler’s influence and the Hitler Youth, Hörbiger launched a campaign to spread his ideas,
violently when necessary. In Germany, astronomers were molested in the streets, and businessmen
converted to his teachings had their employees sign a declaration: ‘I swear that I believe in the
theory of eternal ice.’ Over the next few years the movement published three large volumes of
theoretical writings, forty books, hundreds of pamphlets, and the monthly magazine, The Key to
the World.

Hörbiger’s Welteislehre with its belief in Root Races - divided into superior and inferior
races - was derived from the writings of the theosophist Madame Blavatsky.57 His Sixth Root
Race, the Supermen, said to evolve after a future cataclysmic event, became part of Hitler’s
National Socialist teachings. Hörbiger’s theories justified Nazi orthodoxy and race theories.
Hitler told Rausching that nature needed a hand in mutating the human race into a super race, and
that had been what Hitler had been doing by weeding out the social vermin. ‘I will tell you a
secret. I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid of him.’ Hitler trembled
with ecstasy.58 After the cataclysm of the third moon, new forms of humanity appeared: Gypsies,
Negroes and Jews. These were not real men, as they were born after a lapse of the creative force,
these creatures only imitated Mankind, for they belonged to a separate species. Hitler explained: ‘I
do not mean that I look upon Jews as animals, for they are much further removed from animals
than we are. Therefore, it is not a crime against humanity to exterminate them, since they do not
belong to humanity. They are creatures outside nature.’59 While the superior race was Aryan,
Hitler’s definition was somewhat arbitrary. His admiration of Genghis Khan was acceptable
because the warrior’s ancestors had come from Atlantis to found the illustrious Mongol
civilization in Central Asia. Jewish scientists and engineers were made ‘honorary’ Aryans,
especially if they lacked Semitic features, and remained in German society throughout the war.

Hörbiger’s seventieth birthday was celebrated in 1930 with a commemorative volume


containing contributions by some of his disciples, published as Parts 11 and 12 of a series called
The Key to Universal Events. Professor Ernst Bergmann cited the Welteislehre as a spiritual
achievement of which the German people should be proud. Elmar Brugg (pseudonym of Rudolf
von Elmayer-Vestenbrugg), a major follower of Hörbiger, wrote in 1936 that when the present
moon was captured a massive tidal bulge submerged Atlantis forcing the strong heroic-warrior
Aryan race to escape to nearby continents. The remnants of the Atlanteans can be seen in the
ancient megaliths of ‘mysterious Easter Island’ and the ancient metropolis of Tiwanaku. Brugg
believed every German should be thankful and proud that Hörbiger, the creator of the illustrious
and powerful Welteislehre, was an equal to the giants of astronomy, Copernicus and Kepler.60 In
1937 Brugg produced a list of the top scientists who supported Hörbiger’s theories. They
included Edgar Dacqué, Professor of Geology and Palaeontology in the University of München;
Bärtling, Professor of Geology at the University of Berlin; Dr Grosse, Director of the Bremen
55
L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, London: Granada, 1972, p. 153.
56
H. Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, London, 1939.
57
Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots, pp. 17-31.
58
Quoted in Pauwels and Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, p. 149.
59
Ibid., pp. 178-9.
60
Elmayer-Vestenbrugg, R. von, Das Geheimnis der Osterinsel, ‘J.B.’, Folge 51, 1936, p.171.

10
Observatory; Professor Franzius of the Technische Hochschule of Hannover; Dr Briefs of the
University of Berlin; Lenard, the co-discoverer of X-rays; and Stark the spectroscopist. The
Hörbiger Institute finally closed its doors in the 1970s. In recognition of the great contribution
that Hörbiger made to Austrian and German science, the Austrian Post Office issued a
commemorative stamp in 1985 to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth.

Arthur Posnansky
By the beginning of the twentieth century the archaeological history of Tiwanaku
remained largely unsolved, opening the way for highly imaginative conclusions. Ever since the
First Chronicler of the Indies, Cieza de León, remarked that Tiahuanaco [Tiwanaku] was ‘the
most ancient ruin in the whole of Peru,’ no archaeological site outside of Gizah in Egypt has
inspired so much speculative pseudo-scientific nonsense. The most noted of these ‘alternative’
scientists was Arthur Posnansky. Posnansky (1874-1946), a young German civil and geodetic
engineer turned archaeologists and anthropologist, who became obsessed with saving Tiwanaku
from destruction after witnessing the British engineers’ destruction of the site. He took a survey
and photographed all that he could, to publish the site’s first archaeological guide, Guía para el
visitante de los monumentos prehistóricos de Tiahuanacu e Islas del Sol y la Luna (‘Guide for
the Visitor to the Prehistoric Monuments of Tiwanaku and the Islands of the Sun and the Moon’).
In 1914 he released his extensive Una Metropolí Prehistorica en la América del Sur, in which his
investigations of the Aymará language showed that the correct pronunciation was ‘Tiwanaku’ and
not ‘Tiahuanaco’. Posnansky offered the British Museum a crate of beautifully decorated pottery
he had dug up from the site, through the British explorer Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Harrison
Fawcett as intermediary, but the offer was rejected as the director considered the artefacts
worthless. On that day, the British Museum lost a priceless collection of Americana.61 Fawcett
disappeared in 1925 while searching for the lost city of ‘Z’ in the Mato Grosso of Brazil, which he
firmly held was an outpost of Atlantis.62

The Professor of Archaeology and Physical Anthropology at the University of La Paz,


Posnansky acquired the site and excavated it at his own expense, collecting together the mass of
artefacts to be housed in the National Museum established in 1925. He photographed everything
that came to light in the diggings to convey the dynamics of a once-powerful and creative
civilization. His zeal saved many great stone carvings from the sledge hammer, as La Paz’s open-
air museum testifies. From this unique collection he formulated his theories and observations on
the city’s contribution to, and influence upon, Bolivian prehistory. Posnansky photographed and
obtained anthropometrics on the Aymará people, who he despised and saw as racially inferior.
Glorious Tiahuanaco was built by a Master Race, not these ‘miserable peasants’.

Posnansky disagreed with previous theories on the city’s origins, and argued instead that
the original builders were not Amerindians, as the city was settled by two races. He determined
from an analysis of the skulls found at the site that the earliest inhabitants were the Mongoloid
people, the ancestors of the American Indians, followed by Middle Eastern Caucasians, who were
responsible for the great engineering achievements. Posnansky asserted that Tiwanaku was the
most ancient metropolis of the Americas, and ultimately responsible for every sophisticated pre-
Columbian civilization in the hemisphere. At the height of Tiwanaku culture, the Second Period,
the glaciers melted overflowing Lake Titicaca, before being partially emptied after massive
tectonic upheavals:

This flowering demonstrates that the builders of the primitive epoch would never have been
able to create the monuments of the Second Period had they not received a remarkable
incentive from the most highly developed tribes of South America, the Khollas… art and
61
The British Museum maintains that it has no record of this offer ever having been made. Personal
Communication, August 1974.
62
Lt.-Col. P.H. Fawcett, Exploration Fawcett, arranged by Brian Fawcett. London: Hutchinson, 1956.

11
science developed from a relatively low state to a height evinced by the megalithic
monuments which are still to be found… sciences, arts and ceramics and sculpture reached
such a degree of perfection that these were not surpassed by any American people until the
conquest.63

His arguments for the diffusion of Tiwanaku culture from Bolivia throughout the
Americas were articulated in Tihuanacu, Cuna del Hombre de las Americas (1945), with an
official forward by the Bolivian president to celebrate the ‘12,000th year of Tiahuanacu’.64
Posnansky’s findings were well received by the nation’s white social elite, for he promoted the
ruins as a national and regional symbol, while shoring up: ‘the intellectual underpinnings
supporting the repressive system of patron-client relationships and economic domination that
characterized the social relationships between European and Indian.’65 A beautiful colour-
illustrated English translation, Tiahuanaco: The Cradle of American Man, was published as a
single volume in 1945. The prologue begins with the rejection of accepted archaeological and
geological precepts: ‘Posnansky envisions the geological development, especially of the
western hemispheres, under the influence of cosmological stress that caused the mountains to
rise, the seas to recede and the polar regions to cool first under changing spectral conditions,
so that organic life could develop there.’66

Antarctica, Posnansky claimed, was the home of pre-Andean civilization, and Tiwanaku was the
cradle of civilization in the present interglacial epoch. Posnansky attributed the trans-American
diffusion of the Tiwanaku civilization to the climatic decline of the altiplano, when it: ‘spread
throughout all those parts of the hemisphere which still remained unaffected by the climatic
aggression, disseminating as they went their enlightenment and beliefs.’67 The city had undergone
two major catastrophes: first an avalanche of water, followed by a sudden upheaval of unknown
nature. Posnansky asserted that the resultant increase in altitude of the lake from sea level to the
present 3,800 metres was long after the city was founded. That agricultural terraces rise up
beyond the present line of eternal snow on Mt. Illimani, and that the strand line around Lake
Titicaca suggests to some that Tiwanaku was a port when its water level was 30 metres higher
than today.68 The climate had changed remarkably over the past three millennia.

When Posnansky measured the angles between two suspected solstice points in the
Kalasasaya temple complex - from the eastern corner to a partially buried lava observational block
(the assumed original position of the Gateway of the Sun) in the centre of western end of the
structure - he realised that it gave an obliquity of the ecliptic not of 23º 27’ as for the year 1930,
but 23º 8’ 48’’.69 This angle of the Earth’s tilt to the plane of orbit around the Sun, which changes
between 22.1° and 24.5° over a 41,000 year cycle, based on the astronomical calculations made at
the Paris Conference of Ephemerides in 1911. In 1909 Sir Norman Lockyer, President of the
Physical Solar Observatory of London, calculated the age of prehistoric British monuments using
solar alignments to calculate the summer and winter solstices: 21 June and 21 December in the
Northern Hemisphere. The angle of obliquity of the stone alignments was compared with a curve
derived from specific formulae to determine the change in the Earth’s tilt over time. The method
was ratified by astronomers at the astronomical ephemeris conference. According to Posnansky’s
calculations Kalasasaya was built circa 15,000 B.C., a date that attracted much scepticism and
derision from the scientific establishment, but aroused much interest in the Vatican.

63
Posnansky, A., Tiahuanaco: The Cradle of American Man, vol. 1, New York: J.J. Augustin, 1945, p. 54.
64
President Gualberto Villarroel López was head of a junta consisting of the military, Fatherland’s Cause, and
the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR).
65
Kolata, The Tiwanaku, p. 15.
66
Posnansky, Tiahuanaco, p. 2.
67
Ibid., p. 2.
68
I. Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, London: Sphere Books, Abacus, (1955) 1973, p. 75.
69
Posnansky, Tiahuanacu, part II, pp. 90-91.

12
Intrigued by the findings, the German Astronomical Commission sent an expedition to
Peru and Bolivia in 1926. Amongst its esteemed members were: Professor Dr Hans Ludendorff,
Director of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Observatory at Potsdam; Professor Dr Arnold
Kohlschütter, Director of the Astronomical Observatory in Bonn; the honorary astronomer of the
Vatican, Specula Vaticanica, Dr Friedrich Becker; and Dr Rolf Müller of the Astrophysical
Institute of Potsdam. These highly esteemed names in astronomy certified the calculations as
correct. In June 1928 the astronomers’ measurements and observations confirmed that Kalasasaya
was used as an astronomical observatory, and that its astronomical alignment indicated a
foundation date of either 15,000 or 9,300 B.C., assuming the observational points were correct. 70
Müller rechecked the calculations so that when Posnansky addressed the Twenty-Third
International Congress of Americanists he could provide them with the new dates of either 10,150
B.C. or 4,050 B.C. for the construction of Tiwanaku, again depending on which alignments were
taken.71

Edmund Kiss
By the late 1920s Nazism was spreading not only through Europe but also Latin
America.72 Hitler had a massive personal library, the military section of which alone consisted of
more than 7,000 volumes divided according to country. Amongst them were works on the Chaco
War (1932-1935), 73 in which Nazi Germany supported Bolivia in its war against Paraguay, which
was supported by the United States and Britain. The Germans had a history of training the
military throughout these countries, and it is no surprise that the first Nazi Party group in South
America appeared in Paraguay in 1929. The Party extolled the supremacy of German culture and
called for maintaining purity of blood by avoiding breeding with the local non-Aryans. Ernest
Roehm arrived in La Paz in 1929 to train troops, and was immediately promoted to lieutenant
colonel. When the Bolivians refused to promote him as supreme commander he returned to
Germany, where he headed the SA (Sturmabteilung: Storm Troopers, the Nazi terrorist militia)
and was murdered on Hitler’s orders in 1934 during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The German
officer, Hans Kundt, led Bolivian troops to disaster in the Chaco War. Over 65,000 Bolivian
troops were killed. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) paid particular interest to Nazi
activity in the country.74 It is into this world of growing Nazi influence and activity that Edmund
Kiss (1886-1960) travelled in 1928.

In World War I Kiss had won two Iron Crosses, one of them first class. After the war he
became an architect and writer. While working as a building contractor in Münster he became
such an ardent follower of Hörbiger’s Welteislehre that he decided to travel to Bolivia to find
evidence to prove Hörbiger correct. The money came from a 20,000 Mark prize he had won in a
writing contest. Kiss spent months drawing the plans of the city and sketching its marvellous
remains. Kiss was well versed in voelkisch ideology and the glorification of the Aryan race,
reportedly influencing Posnansky’s race theories. After talking to Posnansky he claimed that
Tiwanaku was the oldest Nordic colony in the New World. He saw Greek influence in the carved
cross symbols, and claimed to have discovered a massive ‘Nordic Head’, as proof of the theory
put forward by Posnansky that Tiwanaku was an Andean Atlantis, which was abandoned 15,000
years ago after calamitous floods and volcanic eruptions. The head has never been seen since.75
He later wrote of Tiwanaku: ‘The works of art and architecture style of the prehistoric city are
certainly not of Indian origin. Rather they are probably the creations of Nordic men who arrived in

70
Ibid., pp. 47, 91.
71
An examination of nineteenth century published illustrations shows that the Gateway had been moved after
being severely damaged during by a lightning strike.
72
Hugo Fernández Artucio, The Nazi Underground in South America, New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942.
73
Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, p. 235.
74
Max Paul Friedman, Nazis & Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin
America in World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 124.
75
Hale, Himmler’s Crusade, p. 182-184.

13
the Andean highlands as representatives of a special civilization.’76 The proof he needed to
vindicate Hörbiger was to be found on the façade of the Gateway of the Sun. He saw in its bas-
relief a calendar of twelve months, each month possessing twenty-four or twenty-five days, each
day had thirty hours, and each hour twenty-two minutes. This calendar was so ancient it told the
time of a previous moon. The oldest temples at Tiwanaku Kiss concluded ‘must be at least
millions of years old!’77

Kiss returned to Germany before the outbreak of the Chaco War. He worked as a
surveyor in Kassel and wrote a number of science fiction books: Fruehling in Atlantis (Spring in
Atlantis, 1931); Die letze Königin von Atlantis (The Last Queen of Atlantis, 1931); and Die
Singschwaene aus Thule (The Singing Swans of Thule, 1939). In 1936, Kiss and four other
prominent believers in Welteislehre signed an official declaration known as the Pyrmonter
Protokoll, signed in the German spa town of Bad Pyrmont, which states that Welteislehre ‘is a
true Aryan gift of importance.’ Himmler became passionate about Kiss’s novels and asked him to
contribute scientific papers on the Welteislehre. He published his illustrations depicting
Tiwanku’s Nordic architecture in 1937 in Das Sonnentor von Tihuanaku und Hörbigers
Welteislehre (‘The Sun Door of Tihuanaku and Hörbiger’s World Ice Theory’).78 It portrays
Kalasasaya as a pyramid whose walls surround a central open-air square courtyard used for
astronomical observations. From his study of Tiwanaku Kiss visualized the ancient metropolis at
its height, inspiring his plans of Nazi monumental architecture.79 Both SA Mann and the Hitler
Youth magazine Die Hitler Jugend published articles on this ancient Nordic colony. Himmler
was so impressed that he had an expensive leather bound volume of Das Sonnetor von
Tihuanaku printed for Hitler.80

In August 1939, soon after the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, with the
support of Himmler the Ahnenerbe was to pay for Edmund Kiss’s expedition, its largest
expedition so far, to Bolivia. The expedition was to include twenty scientists, and cost 100,000
Reichmarks. The outbreak of war dashed his hopes. Himmler asked Ernst Schäfer to take Kiss
on his Tibet Expedition to assist the team’s searches for proof for the Welteislehre and the origins
of the Aryan race. Schäfer refused to include Kiss. Instead Kiss was sent to Libya to find
evidence. In 1939 Kiss tried to organize another SS expedition to South America, without
success. During the war he fought with the Waffen-SS and towards the end of the war Kiss
assumed command of the SS troops at Wolfschanze, guarding Hitler’s HQ in East Prussia,
where he was later captured in 1945. While at the Darmstadt camp, Kiss met Rudolf Mund, who
after the war helped spread Kiss’s theories on Tiwanaku.81 Kiss was released in June 1947. At his
denazification hearing in 1948, he explained that he no longer was an avid follower of
Welteislehre, but refused to denounce his belief in Rassenkunde, stating ‘there is something to
racial theory, no question about it.’82 The denazification tribunal classified him as a ‘major
offender’, having been a member of Himmler’s personal staff and having received an honorary SS
dagger. The tribunal fined him 501 marks, and he retired to write fantasy novels on Atlantis and
the ancient city of Tiwanaku. Kiss died in 1960, but others took up his teachings.

In the Footsteps of Hörbiger and Kiss


Hörbiger’s Welteislehre continued to influence cosmologists and prehistorians long after
World War II. In 1952 Elmar Brugg published a weighty volume on Hörbiger, whom he called:
76
Edmund Kiss, ‘Nordische Baukunst in Bolivien’, Germanien 5 (May 1933), p. 144.
77
Edmund Kiss, Das Sonnetor von Tihuanaku und Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang, 1937,
p. 107.
78
Ibid., p.146. Also see E. Kiss, ‘Die Kordillerenkolonien der Atlantiden’, Schlüssel zum Weltgeschehen, 8/9, 1931,
pp. 256-265; Kiss, ‘Nordische Baukunst in Bolivien?’, pp. 138-144.
79
Alex Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture, Philadelphia, 1990.
80
Pringle, The Master Plan, p. 182.
81
Hale, Himmler’s Crusade, p. 546.
82
Quoted in Pringle, The Master Plan, p. 310.

14
‘the Copernicus of the twentieth century.’ Brugg wrote: ‘The theory of eternal ice establishes the
connection between cosmic events and the cataclysms attributed to climatic disturbances, disease,
death and crime, and thus opens up an entirely fresh approach to a knowledge of the destinies of
the human race.’83 The results of a survey carried out by Martin Gardiner in 1953, published as In
the Name of Science, showed there were a million disciples of Hörbiger in Germany, England and
the United States.84 Hörbiger’s ideas on the near collision of Mars with Earth, and the devastation
that periodic planetary collisions had on geologic history, had a profound influence on Immanuel
Velikovsky. His best seller, Worlds in Collision (1950), attacked the orthodox dating of the
ancient world. It was followed by an attack on orthodox geology and evolutionary theory, Earth
in Upheaval (1953). Although Velikovsky died in 1979, his writings still attract a large cult
following, his books have remained in print for more than fifty years, and numerous websites put
forward his theories. The English writer, Egerton Sykes, claims in his The Moon Capture Theory
of Horbiger after Fifty-five Years (1966), that the last ice age commenced at 25,000 B.C. when
the third moon fell to Earth. Even the recent ‘Snowball Earth’ theory published in New Scientist in
November 1999 reveals Hörbiger’s influence.85

Hörbiger’s English disciple, Hans S. Bellamy, calculated in his Built Before the Flood:
The Problem of the Tiahuanacu Ruins (1947) that the capture of the present moon was Plato’s
account of the end of Atlantis in 11,500 B.C. The proof of such a cataclysm lay with the ruins of
Tiwanaku. Its megalithic structures and gigantic statues that litter the plain are silent witnesses to
the cataclysms that go back to the collision with the second moon, in the geologic past. Bellamy
found representations on pottery of what he saw was a species of the extinct megafauna, the
toxodon, a giant mammal that has not walked the plains of Bolivia since the end of the Tertiary
Period, 1.8 million years ago.86 Here was proof that mankind had inhabited the region for at least
this length of time, and that America must therefore be the source of Mankind. Looking for
further evidence he found it lying in the residual mud of the cataclysm of the third moon that lay
about the ancient ruins. Tiwanaku at a height of 3,900 metres was one of the five great cities of
Atlantis, with the other key cities being in Mexico, Tibet, Ethiopia, and Papua New Guinea. This
great maritime civilization with its superior beings came to an end 150,000 years ago when the
third moon spiralled into the Earth. The remnants of Atlantis continued to build in the Megalithic
style, as can be seen in the ‘primitive’ cultures of the original civilizations of Egypt, Sumer, China,
Mexico and Peru.87

The figures on the Gateway of the Sun and the Great Idol, wrote Hans S. Bellamy and P.
Allen in The Calendar of Tiahuanaco (1948), were symbols of an ancient calendar divided into
four parts separated by solstices and equinoxes. Each section was further subdivided into three
sections, and these in turn into a further twelve subdivisions, marking the position of the third
moon every hour of the day. Such complexity, Bellamy argued, was proof that the calendar was
built by a higher culture than our own. The Gateway was a calendar, ‘the oldest in the world - nay,
that it has actually come down to us from “another” world.’88 According to the Hörbiger theory as
the third moon spiralled towards the Earth in ever-narrowing orbits the Earth’s rotation increased,
to increase the number of days in the year. This caused the oceans to form an equatorial bulge
such that Tiwanaku was at ‘[t]he level of the ocean must have been at least 13,000 feet higher.’89
Reaching the Roche Limit, the hapless satellite tumbled down into the Earth’s surface with the
oceans receding to the poles, leaving the city on top of a mountain high above the new sea level.
As this happened millions of years before our present moon was caught by the Earth’s
83
R. von Elmayer-Vestenbrugg, Das Geheimnis der Osterinsel, ‘J.B.’, Folge 51, 1936, p. 171.
84
Gardener, Fads & Fallacies, p. 171.
85
‘Snowball Earth’, New Scientist, 6 November 1999, pp. 28-33.
86
Posnansky, Tiahuanacu, part III, p. 57, 133-134.
87
Pauwels and Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, pp. 146-169.
88
H.S. Bellamy and P. Allan, The Calendar of Tiahuanaco: The Measuring System of the Oldest Civilization,
London: Faber & Faber, 1956, p. 18.
89
H.S. Bellamy, Built Before the Flood: The Problem of the Tiahuanacu Ruins, London, 1947, p. 14.

15
gravitational pull, Tiwanaku must also be millions of years old. Bellamy continued to write his
pseudo-scientific books on Tiwanaku into the 1960s.

In 1954 the French Cosmologist Denis Saurat used the theories of Bellamy to argue that
Tiwanaku was founded 250,000 years ago. The city was built by giants 5 metres tall in a land
occupied by giant plants, insects and lizards. This giantism was caused by cosmic radiation, at the
time of the third moon.90 Saurat’s theories borrowed heavily from Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, for
which there had never been any supporting geological evidence. The growth lines on Holocene
(10,000 years) corals show 365.25 days in a solar year; and all other geological evidence proves
that the number of days in Earth’s solar year has not changed in the past 150 million years. Nor is
there the slightest geological evidence that a kilometres high tidal bulge swept around the world,
in the Early Tertiary.91 While a number of massive impact craters have been discovered around the
world geological evidence shows they are caused by meteorites and not collisions with former
moons. Yet Hörbiger’s influence still lingers in pseudo-scientific literature.

Kiss’s ideas have never died. His theories continue to be included in numerous
‘alternative’ archaeology works, such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariot of the Gods? (1968),
Zecaria Sitchin’s The Lost Realms (1990), Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods (1995),
Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia’s Heaven’s Mirror (1998) and R. and R. Flem Ath’s The
Atlantis Blueprint (2001). These writers not only influence each other’s ideas with supporting
‘facts’ to produce a consistent picture grounded on shaky foundations. The best known of these
‘alternative’ archaeologists is Graham Hancock, who in his Fingerprints of the Gods - which sold
in excess of three million copies worldwide - argues that an advanced civilization existed before
the last glacial period that ended around 10,500 B.C. After its destruction, the survivors’
technology collapsed to a primitive level, and Mankind had to lift itself once again by its
bootstraps towards civilization. Hancock argues that the marvelous ancient engineering
achievements of such places as Tiwanaku are the work of his lost civilization. Although Hancock
does not describe the race of this civilization, it is obviously Caucasian.92

Conclusion
With the birth of the modern nation-state, the Bolivian government created a national
history which identified nationalism with the history found within its borders. The late nineteenth
century witnessed a politicization of history, with the state administering the study, teaching and
research of history to serve nationalist structures. Archaeology became institutionalized and
popularized to spread political images useful to both government and the national elite. In
creating a political image of ancient Bolivia, archaeology and anthropology were used to
disenfranchise the indigenous peoples of their past. These scientific disciplines, rather than
being objective, were heavily influenced by politics and cultural and social beliefs to interpret
the collated artifacts and objets d’art to prove that the intellectual capacities of the nation’s
indigenous peoples were inferior to those of whites. Bolivia’s archaeologists, anthropologists
and historians appropriated the past through museums constructed for the public gaze. The
past so produced held the Indigenous in the vice-like grip of racial determinism.

The national education system disempowered the Aymará, for teaching about Indigenous
prehistory uses written history and archaeology to impose a system of knowledge by the dominant
political group, threatening the cultural self-worth and existence of the colonized as a people. Oral
history became irrelevant, for when oral history is in conflict with archaeological interpretation,
the politics and cultural imperialism of the dominant race overrides indigenous interests. The

90
Hermann and Georg Schreiber, Vanished Cities, Translated from German by Richard and Clara Winston.
London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, (1955) 1958, pp. 57-58.
91
C.K. Seyfert and L.A. Sirkin, Earth and Plate Tectonics: An Introduction to Historical Geology, New York:
Harper & Row, 1973.
92
Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, London, 1995.

16
myths belonging to the colonized indigenous peoples become fiction in contrast to the ‘true’
history of the white colonizers, based on the latter’s archaeological finds organised in a way
consistent with their supposed occidental superiority. The past was constructed for the benefit of
the colonizers and white rulers. As the image of ancient, non-literate, ‘primitive’ societies is linked
to contemporary Third and Fourth Worlds, the ancient past set the realm of modernity.

When a people have no history, they have no past, and when they have no past, their
claims to their ancestral lands are nullified. This denial of the indigenous past has been part of
the political utilization of prehistory by nationalism, with archaeology becoming a tool of
cultural extinction, reconstructing a prehistoric past in which the indigenous peoples played a
limited role. For when archaeology is history, and history is literature, a non-literate society is
considered primitive and uncivilized. By being classified as non-literate and therefore
uncivilized, Bolivia’s indigenous people have historically had their self-esteem undermined, and
denied their attachment to the past. This denial of an indigenous past through archaeological
racism has led to acts of cultural and physical genocide.

Little consideration had been given for the indigenous prehistoric past until La revolución
nacional of 8 April 1952. The revolution broke the control of the racist and exploitative hacienda
system,93 with its achievements remaining one of the most political events of the Cold War in Latin
America.94 The consequence of the revolution was a renewed interest in Bolivian prehistory, and a
rethinking of the achievements of the indigenous population. Scientific excavation and
reconstruction would restore Tiwanaku’s forgotten history to its rightful place. Archaeological
sites were to be thoroughly investigated. To do this Carlos Ponce Sangínes founded the Center
of Archaeological Investigation in Tiwanaku in 1957. The prehistoric past was now aligned to an
Aymará prehistoric glory, for it was they who were the main instigators of the revolution.
‘Tiwanaku was now Bolivian cultural patrimony, and the Aymara were inheritors of the
nation’s glorious past.’95 Even so until recently the Aymará had to pay an entrance fee to
perform religious practices in their own ancient religious site of Tiwanaku. That their
archaeological sites belong to the state by the legislation that conserves the nation’s
archaeological remains has resulted in the Indians’ loss of ownership of their past and its
artifacts.96

These colonized peoples have not only been subjected to laws and institutions that
removed their land and resources, but they have also suffered from official histories that denied
their past for political and racial gains. Today political power is manifested by the Aymará through
rituals performed within their political movement. The legitimacy and power demonstrated when
the first fully indigenous president Evo Morales assumed office in December 2005 is provided by
authentic artifacts, symbols, modes of dress, feasts, and traditional rituals performed by the
Aymará at Tiwanaku. These rituals express the political ideology of the new state, appropriating
old meanings to repossess their latent political power. History is being forged as shared memory,
establishing temporal continuity and social coherence. Tiwanaku today stands as a monument to
Indigenous mobilization, a symbol of national strength. The ancient site has become a place of
cultural resistance where new rituals and a system of symbolic representation legitimizes and
justifies Aymará society. The prehistory Tiwanaku represents has been regained.

93
James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia 1952-1982, London: Verso, 1984, p.
133.
94
Grindle and Pilar Domingo (eds), Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University, 2003; Laura Gotkowitz, A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land
and Justice in Bolivia, 1880-1952, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008.
95
Janusek, John Wayne, Identity and Power in the Ancient Andes: Tiwanaku Through Time, New York:
Routledge, 2004, p. 64.
96
P. Stone, and R. MacKenzie, (eds), The Excluded Past: Archaeology in Education, London: Unwin Hyman, p.
xxiii, p. 4.

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