The Wari Empire was a political formation that emerged around AD
500 in the central and northern highlands of Peru. Empire or
not? It is debated if the phenomenon can be termed an empire and
some archaeologists such as Ruth Shady have suggested that Wari
was not an empire, but rather a loose economic network of Wari
centres. However, many other scholars, including William Isbell,
Katherine Schreiber and Luis Lumbreras, have strongly argued for
the centralised nature of the Huari polity. While Huari probably
had significant organizational and administrative power, it
remains unclear what the origins of its political and artistic
forms were – emerging evidence suggests that rather than being
the result of Tiwanaku traits diffusing north, the Wari and
Tiwanaku ideological formations may be traceable to previous
developments at Pukara, an Early Intermediate Period culture to
the north of Lake Titicaca. The polity seems to have survived
until ca. AD 1100, when it collapsed probably as a result of
both environmenta