Scientists discover ancient city in Peru

Scientists discover ancient city in Peru

Scripps Howard News Service

(April 26, 2001 2:20 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - While the Egyptians were building some of the first pyramids 4,600 years ago, their Peruvian contemporaries were building stone platform mounds, plazas and canals in what new dating techniques show to be the oldest major city in the Americas.

New radiocarbon dates from plant fibers indicate that the city known as Caral in central Peru was thriving between 2600 and 2000 B.C., more than a thousand years before other known cities in the Western Hemisphere, researchers report in the Friday edition of the journal Science.

"What we're learning from Caral is going to rewrite the way we think about the development of early Andean civilization," said Jonathan Haas, curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the study. "Our findings show that a very large, complex society had arisen on the coast of Peru centuries earlier than anyone had thought."

Sitting on a dry desert terrace above a green valley floor watered by the Supe River, Caral is one of 18 large sites featuring "monumental" architecture. The largest stone pyramid at Caral is about two football fields long, nearly as wide and five stories tall. The entire city covers some 200 acres.

While there are some other small town sites with modest mounds in the region that seem to be older, nothing else from the third millennium B.C. come close to the scale or complexity of buildings in and around Caral.

The mounds were partly ceremonial but also used at least some of the time as bases for homes of high-status residents - beginning a pattern of mound building cultures in the Americas that stretched to the Mayans, the Kehokian culture of the Mississippi Valley and the Aztec empire found and conquered by the Spanish 3,000 years later.

"The size of a structure is really an indication of power," Haas said. "It means that leaders of the society were able to get their followers to do lots of work. People don't just say, 'Hey, let's build a great big monument.' They do it because they're told to and because the consequences of not doing it are significant."

Like the Egyptians building the Great Pyramids half a world away, the builders working in the Supe Valley lacked advanced tools, draft animals or the wheel. In fact, they didn't even know how to make pottery, a deficiency that caused archaeologists who first found the sites in 1905 to dismiss them as unimportant.

Workers building the enormous platform mounds used an ancient kind of gabion construction - carrying bags woven from reeds and filled with stones and debris from larger cut stone and placing them intact inside stone retaining walls.

Those reeds, which live for only a year, provided the fibers that Haas and colleagues Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University and Ruth Shady Solis of the Universidad National Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima, used to date the construction.

"The radiocarbon dates help to put the site in context. Certain structures at Caral are common in the Andes, but now we know that these are some of the first. It's like saying we're looking at the first Christian church," Haas said.

The terraced mounds were used by the ruling elite to administer the city and surrounding area as well as living quarters, with stairs, rooms, courtyards and other structures placed on top of the pyramids as well as on side terraces. Ongoing excavations are planned to determine if there were rooms, passageways or even tombs inside the mounds, as well as to try and determine if all the sites in the valley were occupied at the same time.

Caral also had a variety of apartment-house type buildings made of mud, wood and stone, with varying degrees of construction quality that suggest class differences. Debris left behind in the foundations shows people lived in them.

There are also three circular sunken plazas, the largest 150 feet across, that were probably used for religious ceremonies. Similar ceremonial structures continued to be built in the Andes for thousands of years.

Caral apparently was a hybrid society that lived both from agriculture and harvests from the sea. Aspero, a smaller coastal village near the ocean 14 miles from Caral, has been dated to nearly 5,000 years ago.

People in the valley raised such plants as squash, beans and cotton, but no corn or other grains. This dashes the notion of many anthropologists that a civilization must cultivate grains that can be stored and exchanged for work in order to build monumental architecture. Creamer speculates that the food currency of the society may have been dried fish.

Creamer also suspects that the canals of Caral may have been the first built in the Americas to help support agriculture.

Although the site today is dry, remote and sparsely settled, Caral appears to have played a pivotal role in social, political and economic development of civilization in South America, providing ancestral roots to the Incan empire.