of archaeological projects and have promoted the protection of the prehistoric cultural heritage in those regions. Added to these efforts, the creation of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of San Andrés in La Paz in 1984 provided a firm base for the education of a new generation of Bolivian archaeologists.

Current Archaeological Research

Since the 1980s, new multinational and multidisciplinary projects have been conducted in Bolivia. The Wilajawira archaeological project, under the direction of Alan Kolata and Oswaldo Rivera Sundt, has revealed the importance of raised fields in the Tiwanaku agricultural economy, the centralized structure of the Tiwanaku state (with a quadripartite hierarchical system), and the nature of urbanism in the Tiwanaku core (Kolata 1989, 1993).

The International Seminar of Archaeological Excavations in Tiwanaku, a part of the Wilajawira project directed by Kolata and Ponce Sanginés, developed a number of specifically oriented research areas such as paleoethnobotany and diet analysis (Lennstrom, Hastorf, and Wright 1991), settlement pattern studies (Albarracín-Jordán 1990; Mathews 1992), household and domestic archaeology (Bermann 1994; Janusek 1994), craft specialization (Rivera Casanovas 1994), public architecture (Couture 1992; Manzanilla and Woodard 1992; Rivera Sundt 1989; Sampeck 1991), physical anthropology and demography (Blom 1999), paleozoology (Webster 1993), and ceramic analysis (Alconini 1995; Sutherland 1991). Undoubtedly, the Wilajawira archaeological project constituted the largest multinational effort, produced a great body of information about Tiwanaku, and set the foundation for a multidisciplinary approach to Bolivian archaeology.

Other multinational and multidisciplinary projects have been conducted in the highlands. Since 1992, Christine Hastorf, head of the Taraco archaeological project, has been conducting an extensive investigation of the site of Chiripa, a pre-Tiwanaku polity that arose during the formative period near the shores of Lake Titicaca. The most important contributions of this project were the excavation and exposure of the ceremonial core of Chiripa, comprising a series of terraced platforms, specialized architecture, and burial and domestic areas around a semi-sunken temple. The project has also refined the chronological sequence of the site, conducted regional studies, and paleobotanical analysis (Hastorf et al. 1996). Another large-scale project was the Iwawe archaeological project, which was directed by William H. Isbell and Juan Albarracín-Jordán between 1995 and 1998 in the Iwawe region near Lake Titicaca. This work clarified our understanding of the formative period and the origins of Tiwanaku before it became a state (Isbell 1993). Charles Stanish and others have conducted extensive excavations and settlement studies at the Island of the Sun, Lake Titicaca (Stanish et al. 1996).

Small-scale projects, with Bolivian participation, have also been conducted in the Bolivian highlands. These include the Yaya-Mama archaeological project, coordinated by Karen Mohr Chavez, Sergio Chavez, and Eduardo Pareja in the region of Copacabana and adjacent areas since 1993, which seeks to understand the role played by religion in the unification of the various polities around the lake before the emergence of Tiwanaku. A new approach to archaeology has been implemented by Sergio Chavez in his promotion of the participation of local indigenous Aymara communities in different stages of archaeological research, part of a strategy to make them active participants in the reconstruction and reappropriation of their own cultural past.

Other regions of Bolivia were also subjected to similar multinational and multidisciplinary projects in the decade 1990–2000. Albert Meyers (1997), from the University of Bonn, and a German-Bolivian team have extensively excavated, conserved, and restored different areas of Samaipata, an Inca complex with one of the largest carved rocks in South America located at the margins of the sub-Andean piedmont before the rise of the Amazonian savannas. Other small-scale binational projects have been conducted in these tropical areas. In Beni, Clark Erickson, along with Bolivian and American archaeologists, has documented the landscape,