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because the accused often use legal guarantees of religious freedom as part of their defense.
Monuments Built by a God The mysterious ruins of Tiahuanaco lie about 4000 meters (12,500 feet] above sea level at a remote location in western Bolivia. According to many experts, the precision and quality of the stonework at the site is unmatched anywhere in the world. Some of the individual stone blocks weigh more than 70 tons and were transported from a quarry about 10 kilometers [6 miles] away. One well-known monument, the Gateway of the Sun, was cut with remarkable precision from a single block of a very hard type of rock called andesite. The overall workmanship at the site is so good that modern stone-cutters equipped with steel tools and electrically-powered machinery would find it hard to achieve the same quality.
According to scientists who have studied Tiahuanaco, it was a major ceremonial center of a pre-Inca civilization that arose in the region about 2000 years ago. Eventually, for unknown reasons, this civilization disappeared. Centuries later, when the first Spanish explorers reached the area, the people who lived near Tiahuanaco knew virtually nothing about the earlier civilization. In fact, these people believed that the structures at the site had been built by a god. They also believed that this god, whose name was Viracocha, had created some gigantic artificial robots to help move the massive stones.
Note: Because the precision and quality of the stonework at Tiahuanaco is so remarkable, some people refuse to believe that pre-modern humans would have been capable of building it. There is even a theory that it was actually built by aliens from another planet who visited the earth thousands of years ago. Some supporters of this theory say that native legends depicted these aliens as gods, and that this could have led to the belief that Tiahuanaco was built by a god. Of course this theory is mostly speculation.
