Commentary: Hal Rothman finds a piece of Vegas in an ancient Incan capital

Sunday, July 30, 2006 | 8:16 a.m.

One of our particular conceits is that Las Vegas is unique among cities in human history. No parallels exist for our miracle in the desert, we like to gloat, and with good reason. It is improbable that any city grew so fast and achieved so much without producing more than smiles on people's faces.

You will never eat an apple from an orchard in the Las Vegas Valley - even though there is one - and you will never wear a sweater made from the wool of a sheep that grazed our fine grasses. We simply were not a viable part of that world.

I have been on a quest for parallels to Las Vegas. I simply can't believe that we are unique, that until Bugsy Siegel came along, no one ever thought of a city that made a ritual out of leisure. If there is nothing new under the sun, and usually there isn't, there has to be a precedent for Las Vegas.

I went to my friend, Andrew J.E. Bell, who teaches ancient history at UNLV. Bell told me that Las Vegas replicated the function of cities in the ancient world. In those days, people worked all year raising crops, and when the harvest was complete, they took their produce to the city to sell. Once there, they spent some time, perhaps taking a trip to the baths that dotted the ancient world or engaging the services of a prostitute or three. After such an indulgence, they went home, full of memories to hold them another year.

Pretty good parallel, but not perfect. That was the old Las Vegas, the stigmatized city of American folklore, the place your preacher warned you about. The new Las Vegas is more than simply a place to exchange money for service. It has also become famously ritualistic, part and parcel of the iconography of its society. People come to Las Vegas to be seen as well as to see it. They invest in it a marker of their accomplishment, as a way to announce they have arrived in the new century and are part of the future.

I continued my search and stumbled across Tiwanaku, an Incan capital high in the mountains of the Andes. Between 800 and 300 B.C., the city flourished. Archaeologists once thought that Tiwanaku was an administrative center much like European imperial capitals, but recent work suggests a very different place.

Tiwanaku appears to have been a "cross between the Vatican and Disneyland," according to Charles Mann, author of "1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus." It had ceremonial connotations at the same time it had an extremely small population. Basically, Tiwanaku was populated by service workers, people who earned their keep by catering to visitors. Sound familiar?

Tiwanaku had another problem we know well. It, too, had to keep them coming back. Then as now, the premium was on the new, the fresh, the innovative. Tiwanaku was caught in the same predicament that we have, finding a way to anticipate desire rather than simply reflect it.

It also shared another Las Vegas trait: Tiwanaku tore down and rebuilt its core area time and again to achieve the illusion of the new. It had to, for its visitors, like ours, came to see the spectacle, to embrace the essence of their culture, and to experience something they could not get elsewhere.

Not surprisingly, Tiwanaku drew pilgrims by the thousands. Its visitors found what they wanted there, and most likely made the place into a canvas for their Andean neuroses. More than anything, this is Las Vegas' role for American and increasingly world society.

A few years ago, there was a documentary called Holi-Days, about the way in which people made pilgrimages to Florence, Italy; Jerusalem and Las Vegas. These are very different kinds of pilgrims, but the film made the case that the difference was only in the object of desire.

This argument heightens the parallels between Las Vegas and Tiwanaku. Our visitors seek redemption and reinvention, but usually not in a religious sense. Tiwanaku had strong religious connotations, for leisure was unknown in that world. But both drew pilgrims, in large numbers, and both kept them coming back by changing what they were. I wonder if Tiwanaku's service workers felt like ours. I wonder what caused the end of their world.