Site in Peru Marks Oldest City in Americas

Archeologists have identified the oldest city in the Americas, a massive 4,600-year-old urban center called Caral in the Supe River Valley of Peru.

Researchers have known of Caral, which is about 120 miles north of Lima and 14 miles from the Pacific Ocean, for nearly a century but had no idea, until now, of its true age.

The city and as many as 17 others nearby were constructed about the same time the pyramids were being built in Egypt, about 800 years before the oldest previously known cities in the Americas.

The monumental construction project was carried out at a time when early Americans were thought to be living only in small coastal fishing villages.

The city was built before corn was domesticated or pottery to store it in was developed--both of which were thought to be crucial to the development of civilizations.

“This is one of the most important discoveries in New World archeology in the last 30 years,” said archeologist Brian Billman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was not involved in the research. “It completely shakes up our notion of what is going on in this time period. Every textbook on Andean archeology will have to be rewritten as a result.”

“It’s really a once-in-a-lifetime discovery,” said archeologist Jonathan Haas of Chicago’s Field Museum, who led the project along with his wife, Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University, and Ruth Shady Solis of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima. Their report appears in today’s Science.

“It looks like Caral is really the first complex society in the New World,” Haas said.

Caral was discovered in 1905, but very little excavation occurred there--in large part, because there were few artifacts to point to its age. The city was built in the pre-ceramic era, so there were no pottery shards to attract the attention of archeologists who rely on pottery design for dating and cultural understanding.

Some people had suggested that Caral was quite old, said Yale archeologist Richard Berger, but there wasn’t enough data to support the idea. The new results are “a crucial confirmation” of the suspicion that Caral is exceptionally ancient, he said.

Most of Caral remains buried under nearly four millenniums of dust, but what has been unearthed is still impressive.

Caral is dominated by six large stone platforms built from quarried stone and filled in with cobbles from the nearby river. The largest of the platforms is 60 feet high and measures 450 feet by 500 feet at its base. The platforms held structures such as official residences and administrative offices.

The site has three sunken plazas and eight sectors of dwellings--apartment buildings, modest homes and grand, stonewalled residences. Stairs, rooms, courtyards and other structures were built on top of the platforms as well as on the side terraces.

The cobbles in the platforms proved to be the key for dating the city. The ancient Peruvians carried the cobbles to the site in bags woven from reeds grown locally. Each bag and its contents were added to the growing pile of fill.

Haas’ team dated the bags’ organic material and concluded that the construction was conducted as early as 2627 BC. The entire complex was built in only one or two phases, an efficient process indicative of careful planing, centralized decision-making and mobilization of a large labor force.

The Supe River Valley is hot and arid, not an ideal climate for agriculture to support a large city or a construction project. The ancient Peruvians compensated by installing one of the world’s first complex irrigation systems, diverting the river more than a mile upstream and using the water in their fields.

In that manner, they were able to grow guava, beans, peppers, cotton and fruits such as pacay and lucuma. To their surprise, however, the Chicago research team found no evidence of corn, potatoes or any crop of the type believed necessary to sustain a large population.

Most archeologists have thought that cities could develop only when agriculture had progressed to the point that large quantities of corn could be grown and accumulated. That food supply could then be doled out to feed and pay for the labor force assembled for construction. That does not seem to be what happened here, however.

Instead, Haas and Creamer speculate that the key crop was cotton, which could be woven into thread and twine and used to make fishing nets. Caral most likely traded cotton to coastal villages, receiving anchovies, sardines, shellfish and other seafood in return.

Desiccated feces recovered from the site “all have anchovy bones in them,” Haas said.

The research at Caral and similar sites is important, Haas said, because “it helps us understand the beginnings of power relationships. These mounds (platforms) were built because somebody told the people to build them.”

For Haas and his colleagues, the evidence of social structure at Caral raises an intriguing question: How did a small group of leaders obtain power over their fellows when such a relationship had never existed before?

“It boils down to, ‘Why do we have government?’ ” Haas said.

The team is not sure yet how many people lived at Caral. “It could have been 1,000, 10,000 or 50,000,” Haas said. “I honestly don’t know.”

Nor do the researchers know what eventually happened to the community. The site was apparently abandoned between 2000 and 1500 BC, and the valley has remained virtually unoccupied ever since.

“The real irony is that the peak of civilization in this area happened before 2000 BC. Nothing much has happened in this valley since.”

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Pictures and other information about Caral are available on the Internet at: https://www.eurekalert.org/E-lert/current/public_releases/scipak/shady.html.

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Ancient City

Archeologists have identified the oldest major city in the Americas at Caral in the Supe River Valley of Peru. Caral and as many as 17 other cities in the Supe Valley were built 4,600 years ago, 1,000 years before the oldest cities previously known in the New World and much earlier than researchers had previously believed.