to about 400 BCE. The exact date of the Tello Obelisk is not known, but based on its style it probably dates to the middle of this range, around 800 BCE. The form of the chakana may be replicated in the Akapana, a large terraced platform mound with a central reservoir built at the site of Tiahuanaco by people of the Tiwanaku culture near Lake Titicaca, Bolivia and dating to about AD 400. Tiwanaku was the center of the Tiwanaku Empire, which thrived in the southern Andes from about 400 to 1000 CE. The mestizo historian Garcilaso de la Vega, el Ynga, reports about a holy cross of white and red marble or jasper, which was venerated in 16th-century Cusco. The cross had been kept in a royal house, in a sacred place or wak'a, but the Incas did not worship it. They simply admired it because of its beauty. The cross was square (quadrada), measuring about two by two feet, its branches three inch wide, the edges carefully squared and the surface brightly polished. The Incas began to venerate the holy cross, after they heard how Pedro de Candia had miraculously defied a lion and a tiger holding a cross. When the Spaniards captured the city, they transferred the cross to sacristy of the newly built cathedral, where De la Vega saw it in 1560. He was surprised that the clergy had not decorated it with gold or gems. As we know from Middle America, this may have been part of a deliberate strategy by mendicant friars, trying to adapt to indigenous cultural codes. As a rule, the veneration of the holy cross was a carefully designed ecclesiastical enterprise, incorporating native symbols and reproducing them on sacral level. Most surviving Andean crosses do not predate the 16th century. Ongoing stories about indigenous crosses contributed to the idea of a 'natural' religion that would have prepared the Indians for their inevitable conversion to Christianity. Controversy Some scholars regard it as an “invented tradition". Although the Chakana as the 'Andean cross', presented as an Inca and pre-Inca symbol bearing cultural, spiritual, or mystical interpretations as expressed in this article, has wide popularity in contemporary Andean culture, its roots are no older than the late 20th century, and the popular version, than 2003. The current Chakana mythos as it impacts the New Age belief system and the Peruvian tourist-oriented economy initiates from