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Caral:
The Oldest City In The Americas
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Caral Supe
Lima Peru |
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Main Caral Pyramid undergoing restoration |
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Caral Amphitheater Temple illuminated at
night |
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Caral,
Peru: The Oldest Citadel In The Americas |
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Text by Ruth Shady Solis,
photos by Walter H. Hust/ Ruth Shady Solis/ Walter
Silvera
 (LIP-jl) -- Using the
Carbon 14 dating method, it has recently been
established that Caral is the largest urban
settlement with monumental architecture from the
Late Archaic period in Peru. These results confirm
that an advanced culture developed in the northern
central area of the country, and that the Supe
valley was the center of the first state to be
founded in Peru.
But the most surprising discovery so far has been
that Caral is the oldest city in the Americas,
having been built some 2627 before Christ.
Although it has been known for decades that
monumental architectural remains exist in the Supe
valley, nobody had ever taken the time to establish
their precise age. The majority of archaeologists
assumed that such buildings must have come from the
formative period.
That was also our working hypothesis in 1994, when
we were prospecting in the lower and mid sections of
the Supe valley, with financial help from the
National Culture Institute (INC) and, later, the
National Geographic Society. We studied the aerial
photos of the area and the archaeological survey
made by Carlos Williams and Francisco Merino.
In 1996, when we began to excavate at Caral, our
intention was to date the eighteen sites that bear
common features and characterize the sociocultural
expressions of their builders. We selected the area
because it was one of the most extensive known sites
and because it showed an ordered design with a
variety of monumental architectural styles.
Despite serious economic limitations, although we
are being helped by the National University of San
Marcos (UNMSM) and the municipalities of Supe Pueblo
and Barranca, we continued with our excavations.
In 2000, we sent samples away to be Carbon 14 dated.
The results confirmed what we had already
established using relative chronology in our first
publications in 1997- namely that Caral is the most
extensive urban site with monumental architecture
from the Late Archaic period in Peru. This
establishes that there was advanced cultural
development in the central northern area of Peru and
that the Supe valley was the centre where a State
was founded for the first time in Peruvian history.
Central northern development
Not all the social groups that populated Peru in the
Late Archaic period possessed the same level of
development. The majority lived in sedentary
villages and their principal activities were
fishing, farming and herding.
Two important technological innovations did occur,
however, in the central northern area which
increased productivity and contributed to population
growth. They were the cotton fishing nets for use on
the coast and the use of irrigation canals and the
construction of small terraces for agriculture in
the inter-Andean valleys.
We now know that during the Late Archaic period Supe
was a political state, and that its society was run
by a permanently constituted authority with
coercive-ideological power to support its decision
making.
We consider it a civilization because it was a
society that produced a surplus, possessed
stratified social classes, cities and state
government.
We class Caral as a city because it was built in an
orderly manner and was populated by a large number
of people who were involved in activities unrelated
to food production such as government, religious
observance, administration, manufacturing and
commerce.
The Caral site
Caral is located on the central northern coast of
Peru, 182 kilometers from Lima and 23 kilometers
from the coast, where the mid-section of the Supe
valley begins at 350 meters above sea level.
The city was constructed on an alluvial terrace,
some 25 meters above the valley floor in a desert
landscape crossed by Andean foothills and a few sand
dunes. From within the city the valley is not
visible, and only the sky the mountains and the
magnificent work of man can be seen. The site must
have been chosen for its natural features.
The urban settlement occupies an area of 65
hectares, and consists of a central zone of
monumental architecture, including both residential
and non-residential buildings. The citys nucleus
comprises a series of 32 monumental structures
arranged between depressions laid out in accordance
with the residential complexes that surround them.
Towards the valley, on the edge of the alluvial
terrace, a group of small chambers can be
distinguished. These were once an extensive
residential area, removed from the public center.
The eighteen settlements at Caral are
a testimony to the sociopolitical importance of Supe.
Distributed along both sides of the valley for a
distance of some forty kilometers, Caral is one of
the five most extensive settlements built within a
ten square-kilometer radius.
Around 2800 BC, the population of Supe, distributed
among a series of settlements both on the coast and
in the valley, exhibited a strong degree of
occupational differentiation.
The coastal dwellers specialized in fishing and the
extraction of mollusks and seaweed, while in the
valley settlers opened up drainage canals to bring
water down to their food crops and cotton fields.
The impact of its
antiquity
 Until the Middle archaic period the individual members of
society lived in equality, notwithstanding certain
distinctions based on kinship, age and some
non-hereditary personal qualities.
The human remains from the period show similar
levels of nutrition. From the beginning of the Late
Archaic period, however, differences begin to appear
among members of the same social group, which by
this time had become hierarchical.
At Caral, houses vary in location, size and building
material. Some homes are located in the nucleus of
the city, whereas others are more marginalized. Some
are built from stone and consist of several rooms,
although the majority were made from wattle and
daub.
The eighteen radiocarbon dates obtained and
published recently in Science Magazine, aroused
great interest among the scientific community and
the general public, principally because of the
earliest date recorded (that of 2627 BC, at Caral.),
the complex sociopolitical organization, and the
advanced knowledge in the fields of science,
technology, art and architecture in what has been
established as the oldest city in the Americas, and
comparable only with the great focuses of
civilization in the Old World, in Mesopotamia, Egypt
and India.
In America, such results revive old questions
regarding the conditions that made such early
development possible in Peru.
There is interest in the Peruvian process all around
the world, a process that occurred in total
isolation from other contemporary cultural centers,
unlike the major centers of development in the Old
World. |
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High resolution panorama of Cara site
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Piramide Mayor - Main Pyramid |
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Piramide Mayor - Main Pyramid |
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Whale bones discovered at the inland site
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"Shicra" bags used to haul
& bind foundation stones |
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Top of main pyramid |
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Peruvian archaeologists excavate what they believe to
be the oldest city in the Americas, the sacred ruins of
Caral, which lie some 120 miles north of Lima in a
coastal desert between the Andes and the waters of the
Pacific. The ruins,
which have been carbon dated to some 100 years before
the Great Pyramid at Giza, could provide anthropologists
with a glimpse of the birth of modern society in the
Americas.
On a scarp overlooking a lush valley carved through
Peru's dusty Andean foothills, archeologists have
unearthed what they believe is the oldest city in the
Americas - the sacred ruins of Caral.
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Main Caral Pyramid |
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A team from Peru's San Marcos University has
painstakingly excavated the arid hillocks above the
River Supe north of Lima to reveal six ancient pyramids,
an amphitheater and residential complex that they have
dated to as early as 2627 BC.
"In these structures of stone, mud and tree trunks we
find the cradle of American civilization,'' said Ruth
Shady, who is leading the excavations.
 The discovery is already being hailed as the most
exciting find in Peru since 1911, when Yale archeologist
Hiram Bingham stumbled on the ruined Inca citadel of
Machu Picchu hidden in the clouds of the craggy Andean
highlands.
Anthropologists working at Caral believe the
windswept ruins 14 miles from the Pacific will provide a
glimpse of the birth of urban society in the Americas
and may challenge theories that the earliest
civilizations settled by the sea.
They say a priestly society built the stone
structures here without the aid of wheels or metal tools
almost a century before the Egyptians erected the Great
Pyramid at Giza.
The remains, some 120 miles north of Lima in a
coastal desert between the Andes and the Pacific,
predate Machu Picchu by three millennia and are some
1,100 years older than Olmec in Mexico, the oldest city
in the Americas outside Peru.
"I hope this will help Peruvians understand their
history,'' said dust-caked archeologist Rodolfo Peralta,
31, standing atop the biggest pyramid, which is some 60
feet high and a staggering 500 feet long.
"Otherwise people will think our history is just a
tale of being conquered by the Spanish,'' he said.
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Up to 10,000 people may once have inhabited the
160-acre site at Caral, archeologists believe, and its
construction suggests a regional capital with urban
planning, centralized decision making and a structured
labor force. Though today, local Andean natives carve out a
livelihood tending goats and growing corn beside the
dirt track that connects Caral to the nearest town an
hour's drive away.
Despite the hardships of working in the blazing sun
and living in an isolated farmhouse with no electricity
or running water, the sunburned, bearded Peralta brims
with enthusiasm.
For a nation subjugated by 16th century Spanish
conquistadors, who ransacked its rich indigenous culture
in a frenzied lust for gold, such discoveries testify to
the long heritage of what Europeans dubbed the "New
World.''
The once-in-a-lifetime find has sparked acrimony in
the international academic community. Shady accuses U.S.
anthropologist Jonathan Haas of Chicago's Field Museum
of trying to steal the credit for seven years of her
hard work.
"The problem is that he has now presented Caral as
his discovery, when my team has been investigating here
since 1994, sleeping on the ground and working
tirelessly to uncover it,'' an irate Shady said in her
cluttered Lima office.
Haas helped Shady carbon date reed matting from Caral
last year after he became interested in the site in
1996. The two co-wrote a paper in the April edition of
Science magazine.
"I think there has been a misunderstanding. ... I
never wanted to take any credit from Ruth for her
discovery,'' Haas told Reuters by telephone from
Chicago, adding U.S. media had played up his role.
One of the many riddles now confronting archeologists
at Caral is why the inhabitants abandoned the
settlement. Like all pre-conquest civilizations in Peru,
the people here left no written records and the
settlement at Caral was too early even to have ceramics
or more than the most basic tools.
"One theory is that a drought produced a famine,
which forced the city dwellers to move on,'' said
Peralta, noting residents painted many buildings black
in the final stage of habitation, after originally
coloring them white for purity.
Subsequent civilizations never occupied the site but
apparently revered it, leaving gold and silver offerings
at its perimeters. South America's most advanced
pre-conquest civilization, the Incas, built temples on
its outskirts.
Inhabitants of Caral also apparently believed the
buildings were divine, dotting their homes and temples
with tiny alcoves filled with dried-mud figurines and
small sacred bonfires. Excavations have also exhumed a
skeleton from the walls of one home, which was buried
there rather than sacrificed.
Burying The Dead
As with the Mayans who ruled Mexico, Guatemala and
Honduras around AD 300, the construction of religious
pyramids suggest the existence of a theocracy, but the
inhabitants of Caral differed by living in their
ceremonial centers, Peralta said.
Rooms and courtyards on top of the terraced mounds
suggests they had both religious and administrative
purposes. Varied housing also suggest a stratified
society, with different residential areas for the
priestly and laboring classes.
There are also signs Caral had the earliest known
system of crop irrigation in the Americas. Coastal
artifacts, including 32 pipes made of pelican bones (as
well as copious anchovy and sardine bones), suggest the residents
may have traded their cotton and fruit crops with
fishing communities in return for food.
Researchers expect to learn much more about the daily
lives of the people when they discover the city's
cemetery.
"You can tell a lot from a culture from the way they
bury their dead,'' Peralta said as the sun set behind a
pyramid over corn fields in the valley below. |
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The
Caral complex in the Supe Valley. |
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"Shicra" bags used to haul
& bind foundation stones |
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An overall view of the Caral site |
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A view of what the city of Caral looked
like |
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The oldest Quipu ever found! 4,500 years
old! |
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Ampitheater Temple |
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Map of
the Supe Valley |
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Speculative vision of Caral |
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Huanca Pyramid |
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Minor Pyramid |
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| Archaeology Magazine - Volume
58 Number 4, July/August 2005
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Caral - A Monumental Feud |
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by Roger Atwood
Peru's Caral is the oldest city in the western
hemisphere--and the focus of archaeology's most
contentious fight.
Caral feels big. A complex of
pyramids, circular plazas, and staircases, it
sprawls over an arid plain above the Supe River
Valley north of Lima with an air of monumentality
like no other site in the Andes. After nearly a
decade of excavation by Peruvian archaeologist Ruth
Shady of Universidad de San Marcos, a site of giant
proportions is finally emerging. Standing in Caral's
main plaza, next to the monolith that acts as the
site's visual center of gravity, pyramids looming up
on every side with their ramps and frontal
staircases, you feel the power of not just a
long-lost ancient city but what is going to be, over
the next generation or so, one of the most important
archaeological projects in Latin America. The site
is also emerging as the focus of a nasty dispute
between scholars that threatens to overshadow
Caral's significance.
Covering 165 acres, the site is
one of the largest in Peru, but what really sets
Caral apart is its age. Carbon dating on organic
material found all over the site has revealed that
its pyramids are some 4,700 years old, contemporary
with those of Egypt and the ziggurats of
Mesopotamia. Other sites are as old as Caral, but
none approach the size and scope of its
architecture. Caral's people dedicated themselves to
their buildings with civic intensity, constantly
making and remaking their stone-and-mortar walls,
sunken plazas, and densely packed residences, adding
new floors, repainting surfaces, tearing down walls
and erecting new ones. They were early champions of
home improvement.
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To erect their structures, they
perfected the "shicra-bag" technique, by which
armies of workers would gather a long, durable grass
known as shicra in the highlands above the city, tie
the grass strands into loosely meshed bags, fill the
bags with boulders, and then pack the trenches
behind each successive retaining wall of the step
pyramids with the stone-filled bags. With bags
acting as landfill, anchoring and reinforcing the
structure at each stage, the people of Caral were
able to build pyramids up to 70 feet tall.
Five thousand years later, these
shicra bags have led to an intellectual fight to the
death between Shady and archaeologists Jonathan Haas
of Chicago's Field Museum and Winifred Creamer of
Northern Illinois University, a husband-and-wife
team. The hothouse world of Peruvian archaeology is
notorious for its spats, but this one has taken the
vitriol to unprecedented levels--public insults, a
charge of plagiarism, ethics inquiries in both
countries, and complaints by Peruvian | | | | |
