Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 08:40:09 +0100 Reply-To: "Ian Pitchford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [evol-psych] Oldest civilisation in the Americas SCIENCE Volume 292, Number 5517, Issue of 27 Apr 2001, pp. 723-726. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/292/5517/723 Dating Caral, a Preceramic Site in the Supe Valley on the Central Coast of Peru Ruth Shady Solis,1 Jonathan Haas,2* Winifred Creamer3 Radiocarbon dates from the site of Caral in the Supe Valley of Peru indicate that monumental corporate architecture, urban settlement, and irrigation agriculture began in the Americas by 4090 years before the present (2627 calibrated years B.C.) to 3640 years before the present (1977 calibrated years B.C.). Caral is located 23 kilometers inland from the Pacific coast and contains a central zone of monumental, residential, and nonresidential architecture covering an area of 65 hectares. Caral is one of 18 large preceramic sites in the Supe Valley. 1 Museo de Arqueología, Centro Cultural de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Avenida Nicolás de Piérola 1222, Lima 1, Peru. 2 Department of Anthropology, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, IL 60187, USA. 3 Department of Anthropology, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. * To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______ BBC NEWS ONLINE Thursday, 26 April, 2001, 19:12 GMT 20:12 UK Oldest civilisation in the Americas An ancient city in what is now Peru was built at the same time as the great pyramids of Egypt, archaeologists have revealed. New evidence indicates the desert site at Caral, on the slopes of the Andes, was built between 2,600 BC and 2,000 BC. This date pushes back the emergence of the first complex society in the New World by nearly 800 years. And it suggests that the people behind the project were advanced enough to organise the labour needed to create the architectural wonder of the day. Caral is one of 18 sites in central Peru's Supe Valley, which stretches eastward from the Pacific coastline, up the slopes of the Andes. Full text: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1298000/1298460.stm _____ FOR RELEASE: 26 APRIL 2001 AT 14:00 ET US American Association for the Advancement of Science http://www.aaas.org/ Oldest evidence of city life in the Americas reported in Science, early urban planners emerge as power players The ancient Peruvian site of Caral may have been one of the first urban centers in the Americas, thriving more than a thousand years before other known cities, according to a study in the 27 April issue of the international journal, Science. New radiocarbon dates indicate that Caral's immense stone structures were built between 2600 and 2000 B.C. This inland metropolis is therefore roughly the same age as smaller maritime-based societies on the coast, previously thought to preceed more complex societies. "What we're learning from Caral is going to rewrite the way we think about the development of early Andean civilization," said Science author Jonathan Haas, of the Field Museum in Chicago. Given the scale of architectural and agricultural development in Caral, he added, early urban planners were power players. "The size of a structure is really an indication of power," said Haas. "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 built a great big monument,' they do it because they're told to and because the consequences of not doing so are significant." Caral is one of 18 sites in the Supe valley of central Peru, which all have "monumental" architecture, meaning larger than house-size. Such structures are typically associated with civilizations younger than 1500 B.C. Archeologists discovered Caral in 1905, but have not known its age until now. Haas and his colleagues, Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University, and Ruth Shady Solis of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, in Lima, used radiocarbon dating to determine the ages of reed fibers from shicra bags found at Caral. ("Shicra" is the indigenous word for "woven.") Because the reeds live for only one year, the dates were extremely specific. Workers used the bags to carry rocks for building enormous structures called platform mounds, which were partly ceremonial and partly residential for high-status citizens. Instead of reusing the bags, workers placed them, rocks and all, inside the structures' retaining walls. The Supe Valley stretches eastward from the Pacific coastline, up the slopes of the Andes. Caral has some of the largest buildings of the valley's sites; the largest platform mound is approximately the length of two football fields, nearly as wide, and five stories high. The site also has a variety of apartment-like buildings, whose residential nature was revealed by the trash found inside, and others that may have served ceremonial or administrative purposes. Some of these structures, such as the two sunken circular plazas in the central zone of the site, are also found frequently at younger sites in South America. "The radiocarbon dates help us 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,'" said Haas. For years, the best known site in this region was Aspero, a much smaller site at the coastal end of the Supe valley. Researchers did determine dates for Aspero in the 1970s, placing it in the third millennium B.C. Aspero and other coastal sites formed the basis for an influential hypothesis by archeologist Michael Moseley, who proposed that complex societies evolved first in coastal areas. According to this argument, living off the sea required centralized decision-making and organized social structures that were later adapted to more urban conditions. Moseley's hypothesis challenged the prevailing assumption that complex civilization didn't arise until the ceramic period (approximately 1500 BC), when people started cultivating grains and making pottery in which to cook and store them. In contrast to both of these scenarios, Caral's inhabitants used irrigation to cultivate a variety of plants, but no grains. The planning that irrigation requires and the large amount of labor needed to build the city both imply that Caral was a state with a powerful government. The question of how this power structure arose in the first place presents an interesting problem, according to Creamer. Researchers have long noted that most complex societies cultivated some type of grain, which can be stored in large amounts and exchanged for work. "We assume that providing a surplus of food is one of the first ways of concentrating wealth. One of the really intriguing aspects of our research is that there wasn't a product like corn in the Supe valley, but they still managed to develop in this complex way," she said. Creamer speculated that perhaps the citizens of the Supe Valley cities used an alternative type of food "currency," such as dried fish. Although economic systems based on corn have been extremely common worldwide, dried fish may have worked well enough for the several hundred years before corn was available, according to Creamer. More work will be necessary to solve this mystery of the Supe Valley and others, such as whether the sites were inhabited at the same time. In fact, most of the Supe valley sites have yet to be studied thoroughly, according to Creamer. They lacked many of the typical artifacts that archeologists and museum curators were interested in collecting when the site was discovered. And, even today, the valley is remote, with no paved roads, electricity, or public water system. ### This research was funded by the National Geographic Society, the Istituto Nacional del Cultura of Peru, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, the National Museum of Natural History, and Northern Illinois University. A related News article by Heather Pringle will be available on Wednesday, 25 April. http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/aaas-oeo041901.html ____ FOR RELEASE: 26 APRIL 2001 AT 14:00 ET US Field Museum http://www.fieldmuseum.org/ Field Museum anthropologists establish date and importance of the Americas' oldest city CHICAGO - New radiocarbon dates of plant fibers indicate that the site of Caral (120 miles north of Lima, Peru) was home to the earliest known urban settlement - with monumental corporate architecture and irrigation agriculture - in the New World. The surprising evidence pushes the development of these important advances in the Americas back to as early as 2627 B.C. - a time when the pyramids were being built in Egypt. "Our findings show that a very large, complex society had arisen on the coast of Peru centuries earlier than anyone thought," said Jonathan Haas, PhD, MacArthur curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum. The new research is being published in Science April 27, 2001, in a paper coauthored by Haas and his colleagues: Dr. Ruth Shady, director of the Anthropology Museum at la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and research associate at The Field Museum; and Dr. Winifred Creamer, associate professor of anthropology at Northern Illinois University and adjunct curator at The Field Museum. Sitting on a dry desert terrace above the green valley floor, Caral is one of 18 large contemporary sites in the Supe Valley on the Pacific Coast of Peru. Together, the sites indicate a remarkably advanced civilization for this period - despite a lack of ceramics that has puzzled anthropologists for years. This lack of ceramics contributed to the Supe Valley sites being largely overlooked ever since they were first noted almost 100 years ago. But this new research has established that Caral thrived some 4,600 years ago - even before the introduction of ceramics in Peru - and played a pivotal role in the social, political and economic development of civilization in South America. "The location offers an opportunity to investigate one of the fundamental questions of Western archeology and social science, namely, what is the origin of complex, centralized, highly organized society in the Americas?" Dr. Haas said. "This is a project that comes along once in a generation and offers opportunities rarely glimpsed in the field of archeology." The radiocarbon samples from Caral were taken in connection with Dr. Shady's on-going research. Excavations at the site are focused on assessing the range and function of architectural features and determining the sequence and construction methods of the site's monumental mounds. Pyramids dominate landscape Caral is dominated by a central zone containing six large platform mounds arranged around a huge public plaza area. The largest of these mounds, "Piramide Mayor," is truly remarkable: 60-feet high and 450-by-500 feet at the base. Research indicates that all six central mounds were built in only one or two phases, indicating the presence of complex planning, centralized decision-making, and mobilization of large labor forces. The terraced mounds were used for administrative purposes. Stairs, rooms, courtyards and other structures were constructed on top of the pyramids as well as on the side terraces. Excavations will determine whether there were rooms, passageways or even tombs inside the mounds. Other architecture at the site indicates a high level of cultural complexity. The varied styles and quality of Caral's housing point to a richly stratified society. And three sunken circular plazas at the site testify to the emergence of a well-organized religion with open, public ceremonies. The largest of these sunken plazas is 150 feet in diameter. Such plazas are an architectural form that continued throughout the Andes for several thousand years. Ultimately, the social, political and religious system founded in the Supe Valley provided ancestral roots for the great civilization of the Incas, who ruled the Andes some 4,000 years later when the first Europeans arrived in the 16th century A.D. Other villages in Peru were occupied before 2600 B.C., and some of them even had small-scale public platforms or stone rings. However, all of the sites in the Americas occupied in the 3rd millennium B.C. are dwarfed by the 200-acre size of Caral and its huge monuments. Of the 18 recorded preceramic sites in the Supe Valley, 10 are more than 60 acres in size. Any one of these ten, if taken alone, would probably be the largest settlement in the New World during the 3rd millennium B.C. Collectively, this concentration of urban settlements - all with monumental architecture and all based on irrigation - is simply unparalleled in any period. Caral's location some 14 miles inland from the Pacific is also important. Because the Peruvian coast is extremely arid, the only source of water for fields is the Supe River, and the only way to get the river water to arable land is by way of irrigation canals. Thus, as Dr. Creamer noted, "the farmers at Caral may have been the Americas' first pioneers to build canals and open the vast potential of channeling river water to rich desert lands surrounding a river's valley bottom." Caral's domesticated plants included squash, beans and cotton. No corn has been found, and its absence establishes for the first time that this starchy staple was not necessary to the development of a complex society in South America. In sum, this research shows that Caral and the Supe Valley is exceptional because of: its early date for an urban center its large size the presence of irrigation agriculture its huge, monumental architecture its pristine, relatively unexplored condition the existence of nearby contemporary sites of comparable magnitude http://www.eurekalert.org/releases/fm-fma042001.html _____ Thursday April 26 2:16 PM ET Peru Site Birthplace of Civilization in Americas By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) - At the same time as ancient Egyptians were building their pyramids, people along the Peruvian coast were erecting massive stone structures in the first major city in the Americas 4,600 years ago, archeologists said on Thursday. A husband-and-wife team from Illinois and a colleague in Lima say Caral, located in the Supe River valley of central Peru, may represent the birthplace of civilization in the Americas. The site was first discovered in 1905 but remained unexplored. Its significance was unknown until new radiocarbon dating revealed its stunning antiquity. Full text: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010426/sc/science_city_dc.html ____ Peru May Harbor Americas' First City Researchers Gather Evidence of Coastal Civilization From 3rd Millennium B.C. By Guy Gugliotta Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 27, 2001; Page A03 Archaeologists working in the windblown coastal desert of Peru have uncovered the ruins of a city as old as ancient Egypt and more than 1,000 years older than any previously reported urban center in the Americas. The city is clustered around six large pyramids near the town of Caral, about 120 miles north of Lima. Its discovery strengthens the view that a robust coastal civilization arose in Peru more than 4,000 years ago independently of, and much earlier than, the great cultures of South America's Andes mountains and the lowlands of Mexico and Central America. Radiocarbon analysis of the remains of reed bags from the site date Caral to between 2627 B.C. and 2000 B.C., roughly contemporary with Egypt's Great Pyramids and as much as 1,400 years older than Mexico's Olmec, generally regarded as the first complex urban culture in the Americas. Full text: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8889-2001Apr26.html _____ NEW YORK TIMES April 27, 2001 Archaeological Site in Peru Is Called Oldest City in Americas By HENRY FOUNTAIN Researchers investigating a long-ignored Peruvian archaeological site say they have determined that it is the oldest city in the Americas, with a complex, highly structured society that flourished at the same time that the pyramids were being built in Egypt. The finding is forcing a re-evaluation of ideas about the rise of the earliest civilizations in the New World, particularly how and when ancient peoples moved from the coasts, with reliable ocean food sources, to inland settlements with less stable supplies of food. Full text: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/27/science/27PERU.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ligia Parra-Esteban Directora Fundacion VOC de Investigacion de la Comunicacion Entre Cientificos. Apartado Aereo 86745 Bogota. Colombia. http://www.mox.uniandes.edu.co/voc Telefono (+) 571-6242075 Fax (+) 571-6139654 Zona Postal 1102 E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Secretario Junta Directiva Luis H. Blanco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Laboratorio de Investigaciones Basicas. Bloque 9 Ciudad Universitaria. 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