RUINS on Peru’s desert coast dated to some 4,700 years ago suggest an earlier focus of civilisation than any so far identified in the New World. The site of Caral, in the Supe Valley north of Lima, covers 66 hectares (165 acres) and includes pyramids 21m (70ft) high arranged around a large plaza.

“What really sets Caral apart is its age,” Roger Atwood reports in Archaeology. “Carbon dating has revealed that its pyramids are contemporary with those of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia.” These are among the earliest monumental architecture in the Old World. Surveys and excavations in neighbouring valleys, Atwood says, suggest that Caral “stood at the centre of the first society in the Americas to build cities and engage in trade on a large scale”.

Caral has been investigated over the past decade by a Peruvian team headed by Dr Ruth Shady. Other sites in Peru are as early, but the report notes that “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”.

The population is thought to have been about 3,000. Much of the construction was done using “shicra bags”, loosely woven containers resembling a horse’s hay-net which were packed with boulders and used as building blocks. Shicra is a long-bladed annual grass, and thus ideal for radiocarbon dating: sample ages were as early as 2727BC, and when the dates were published in 2001 they opened a new debate on the orgins of Peruvian civilisation.

That Caral was not a unique site was shown by surveys carried out by Drs Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer in three neighbouring coastal valleys, which revealed a number of coeval sites: “There is now evidence of an extraordinary complex of more than 20 separate major residential centres with monumental architecture concentrated in just three small valleys,” they reported. The American team disputes Shady’s claim that Caral is the “capital” of this early polity, seeing it rather as an important regional centre.

At Caral, the two unusual circular plazas have been consolidated: at one of them a cache of 32 decorated flutes made from condor and pelican bones was found. Rubbish from nearby houses showed that sardines, anchovies and mussels were dietary staples. Caral was occupied for perhaps a millenium before it was abandoned.

Whether it can truly be seen as a civilisation comparable in attainment with contemporary Egypt and Mesopotamia is doubtful, but it demonstrates that the tradition culminating in the Inca Empire had deeper roots than anyone imagined.

Archaeology Vol 58 No 4:18-25