Ancient Ruins of America's Oldest City

Patrick C. Chouinard
Fall, 2002

In winter, 2001, archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a previously unknown civilization located approximately 120 miles north of Lima, Peru. As excavations continued over the next thirteen months, they found evidence of a surprisingly sophisticated material culture antedating the Incas by some 4,000 years. Referred to as “Caral,” it may be the sole inheritor of a thousand years of social evolution, even though it appears to have been a Stone Age community.
The site clearly represents a "pre-ceramic" culture i.e., without pottery. Artifacts retrieved from its ruins were made of wood, bone, stone and reeds, and often found together in lavishly ornamented burial chambers. Despite their Neolithic level of culture, the inhabitants knew how to use cotton for weaving textiles, a craft usually not encountered in the Americas and other parts of the world, including some parts of Europe and Asia, for many centuries after Caral disappeared 4,000 years ago.
For almost fifty centuries, the lost city was fundamentally preserved under the swirling grit of Peru’s Supe Valley. Its ancient walls and massive monuments had been consumed by desert sands and left in utter silence. Radiocarbon dating of reed bags, the age parameters of the ancient metropolis from 2627 to 2000 BC. Caral's pyramids are as old as their Egyptian counterparts, and predate Mexico’s Olmec Civilization, once thought to be the oldest in the New World, by 1,000 years.
The site was discovered by Peruvian archaeologist, Dr. Ruth Shady. Although clues to its existence were available prior to her first visit in the early 1990s, she first recognized the crumbling megaliths and stone structures for profound antiquity. ‘"When I first arrived in the valley, in 1994," she told a BBC interviewer, "I was overwhelmed. This place is somewhere between the seat of the gods and the home of man. It is a very strange place."
Revelation had come while she was standing amid a mound of blowing dust, then caught sight of the vague outline of what appeared to be pyramids, six of them altogether. They superficially resembled earthen temple platforms belonging to North America’s Mississippian culture, like those of Cahokia, in Illinois, or Wisconsin’s Aztalan. These Peruvian structures were not conglomerations of loose dirt, however. They were formed of dried mud-brick, plaster and stone.
In other parts of the Americas, pyramids were positioned away from residential areas. But the Caral pyramids had been deliberately situated in a centralized community around which many of the residential areas were based. As the Washington Post states; "Unlike the celebrated Egyptian pyramids,” Shady explained, “Caral's monuments were relatively simple structures, rectangular retaining walls of fitted stones, fronted with mud plaster, and filled with reed bags full of rocks carried from the Supe River."
Like their Maya cousins to the north, 2,000 years later, the builders of Caral terraced their pyramids and installed grand steps ascending the flanks of the ceremonial structures. The monuments average sixty feet in height, with bases more than 500 feet wide, making them the largest of their kind in the Americas.
Related, little known sites are scattered across the Supe River region. They suggest that Caral might have been the focal point for a civilization vaster and more complex than hitherto suspected for pre-Inca Peru. On April 27, 2001, The Washington Post quoted the Northern Illinois University’s Winifred Creamer as saying, "Besides Caral, there also appear to be four other sites you can see from one to another. If they are contemporaneous, we are looking at thousands of people in the valley at a very early date." ■