Caral: the oldest town in the New World
In 2001, the oldest town in South America was officially announced. Dating to 2600 BC, it pushed back the date for the “first town” with one millennium. What is even more intriguing, is that the town of Caral has pyramids, contemporary with the Egyptian Pyramid Era.
Philip Coppens
Sometime before 3200 BC, if not 3500 BC, something happened in the Norte Chico in Peru, an agronomical no-go area, where hardly anything grows. This, however, is the site where the oldest traces of a “genuine civilisation” – pyramids included – were found in America.
Here, at least 25 large ceremonial/residential sites have so far been found, of which Caral has become the most famous. The North Chico, roughly 100 km north of the Peruvian capital Lima, consists of four narrow river valleys, from south to north, the Huaura, Supe, Pativilca, and Fortaleza. The ancient pyramids of Caral predate the Inca civilisation by 4000 years, but were flourishing a century before the pyramids of Gizeh. No surprise therefore that they have been identified as the most important archaeological discovery since the discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911.
The first full-scale archaeological investigation of the region took place in 1941 in Aspero, when Gordon R. Willey and John M. Corbert of Harvard investigated a salt marsh at the mouth of the Supe. They found a big trash heap and a multiroomed building with no pottery and a few maize cobs under the pounded clay floor. They wondered how maize could have been cultivated in a salt marsh and why these people could have agriculture, yet no pottery. Willey and Corbett also found six mounds, some of them nearly five metres tall. They were catalogued as "natural eminences of sand". Thirty years later, Willey, in the company of Michael E. Moseley, revisited the site and realised that these "natural eminences" were in fact "temple-type platform mounds". He also realised there might have been as many as seventeen such mounds, all of which Willey had missed on his first exploration of the site. "It is an excellent, if embarrassing, example of not being able to find what you are not looking for", he commented later. As to its age: carbondating revealed that Aspero could go back to 3000 BC, whereby samples from a nearby site even revealed a date of 4900 BC. Those objective findings were nevertheless seen as impossible - far too old with "what was known" and hence not accepted.
Caral is located 14 miles inland from Aspero. Even though Caral was discovered in 1905, it was quickly forgotten as the site rendered no gold or even ceramics. It required the arrival of Ruth Shady Solis in Caral in 1994 before a genuine paradigm shift would occur. She is a member of the Archaeological Museum of the National University of San Marcos in Lima. Since 1996, she has co-operated with Jonathan Haas, of the American Field Museum. Together, they have found a 150-acre array of earthworks, which includes six large platform mounds, one twenty metres high and more than one hundred on a side. But Shady Solis did not make the same mistake Willey had made: she felt that the “pyramids” were just that: they were not natural hills, as some of her predecessor had catalogued the structures of Caral. Her subsequent research led to the announcement, in the magazine Science on April 27, 2001, of the carbon dating of the site, which revealed that Caral had been founded before 2600 BC. The "impossible" carbondating results of Aspero now seemed more likely... and Caral had become the oldest city in the "New" World, older than the Gizeh pyramids.
What is Caral like? The site is in fact so old that it predates the ceramic period, the reason why no pottery was found. Its importance resides in its domestication of plants, especially cotton, but also beans, squashes and guava.
As mentioned, the heart of the site covers 150 acres and contains six stone platform mounds – pyramids. The largest mound measures 154 by 138 metres, though it rises only to a height of twenty metres; two sunken plazas are at the base of the mound and a large plaza connects all the mounds. The largest pyramid of Peru was terraced with a staircase leading up to an atrium-like platform, culminating in a flattened top housing enclosed rooms and a ceremonial fire pit. All pyramids were built in one or two phases, which means that there was a definitive plan in erecting these monuments. The design of the central plaza would also later be incorporated in all similar structures across the Andes in the millennia to come – thus showing that Caral was a true cradle of civilisation. Around the pyramids were many residential structures. One house revealed the remains of a body that was buried in the wall and appears to have been a natural death, rather than evidence of human sacrifice. Amongst the artefacts discovered are 32 flutes made from pelican and animal bones, engraved with the figures of birds and monkeys. It shows that though situated along the Pacific coast, its inhabitants were aware of the animals of the Amazon. READ MORE HERE:
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