The monumental ruins of Chavín de Huantar, 10,000 ft (3,000m) up in the Cordillera Blanca of the Peruvian Andes, are – officially – a mystery. The vast, ruined granite and sandstone structures – cyclopean walls, huge sunken plazas and step pyramids – date from around 1,000BC but, although they were refashioned and augmented for close to 1,000 years, the evidence for the material culture associated with them is fragmentary at best. Chavín seems to have been neither a city nor a military structure, but a temple complex constructed for unknown ritual purposes by a culture which had vanished long before written sources appeared.

The archæological consensus is that Chavín was some kind of ceremonial focus; some have tentatively located it within a lost tradition of oracles and dream incubation.