Centuries before the Inca ruled the Andes, a succession of cultures rose and fell across the Bolivian altiplano and the Peruvian coast, and this film follows their ruins from Lake Titicaca to the desert north. On the lake's islands, Cayahualla priests still worship Tata Inti, the sun god, at sites built by the Tiwanaku culture around the fourth century AD. The camera moves down to the coast, where Chimú engineers turned desert into farmland and built Chan Chan, a city of roughly 100,000 people, and where fishermen still paddle reed boats called cattail horses through the surf. Shamans lead nighttime rituals with the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus, and a museum in Lima holds over 16,000 skulls, including Nasca and Paraca skulls deliberately elongated as a mark of status. The film spends real time on the Lord of Sipan, the Moche tomb that archaeologist Walter Alva traced after police recovered gold objects from a grave robber, and closes with the Chachapoya cliff city of Kuelap before the Inca finally absorb every culture that came before them.