Living in Peru : your everyday companion

(LIP-jl) -- Using the Carbon 14 dating method, it has recently been established that Caral is the largest urban settlement with monumental architecture from the Late Archaic period in Peru. These results confirm that an advanced culture developed in the northern central area of the country, and that the Supe valley was the center of the first state to be founded in Peru.

But the most surprising discovery so far has been that Caral is the oldest city in the Americas, having been built some 2627 before Christ.

Although it has been known for decades that monumental architectural remains exist in the Supe valley, nobody had ever taken the time to establish their precise age. The majority of archaeologists assumed that such buildings must have come from the formative period.

That was also our working hypothesis in 1994, when we were prospecting in the lower and mid sections of the Supe valley, with financial help from the National Culture Institute (INC) and, later, the National Geographic Society. We studied the aerial photos of the area and the archaeological survey made by Carlos Williams and Francisco Merino.

In 1996, when we began to excavate at Caral, our intention was to date the eighteen sites that bear common features and characterize the sociocultural expressions of their builders. We selected the area because it was one of the most extensive known sites and because it showed an ordered design with a variety of monumental architectural styles.

Despite serious economic limitations, although we are being helped by the National University of San Marcos (UNMSM) and the municipalities of Supe Pueblo and Barranca, we continued with our excavations.

In 2000, we sent samples away to be Carbon 14 dated. The results confirmed what we had already established using relative chronology in our first publications in 1997- namely that Caral is the most extensive urban site with monumental architecture from the Late Archaic period in Peru. This establishes that there was advanced cultural development in the central northern area of Peru and that the Supe valley was the centre where a State was founded for the first time in Peruvian history.

http://filer.livinginperu.com/features/img/caral4.jpg719477

An overview of Caral.

© LIP

Central northern development

Not all the social groups that populated Peru in the Late Archaic period possessed the same level of development. The majority lived in sedentary villages and their principal activities were fishing, farming and herding.

Two important technological innovations did occur, however, in the central northern area which increased productivity and contributed to population growth. They were the cotton fishing nets for use on the coast and the use of irrigation canals and the construction of small terraces for agriculture in the inter-Andean valleys.

We now know that during the Late Archaic period Supe was a political state, and that its society was run by a permanently constituted authority with coercive-ideological power to support its decision making.

We consider it a civilization because it was a society that produced a surplus, possessed stratified social classes, cities and state government.

We class Caral as a city because it was built in an orderly manner and was populated by a large number of people who were involved in activities unrelated to food production such as government, religious observance, administration, manufacturing and commerce.

The Caral site

Caral is located on the central northern coast of Peru, 182 kilometers from Lima and 23 kilometers from the coast, where the mid-section of the Supe valley begins at 350 metres above sea level.

The city was constructed on an alluvial terrace, some 25 meters above the valley floor in a desert landscape crossed by Andean foothills and a few sand dunes. From within the city the valley is not visible, and only the sky the mountains and the magnificent work of man can be seen. The site must have been chosen for its natural features.

The urban settlement occupies an area of 65 hectares, and consists of a central zone of monumental architecture, including both residential and non-residential buildings. The city’s nucleus comprises a series of 32 monumental structures arranged between depressions laid out in accordance with the residential complexes that surround them. Towards the valley, on the edge of the alluvial terrace, a group of small chambers can be distinguished. These were once an extensive residential area, removed from the public center.

The eighteen settlements at Caral are a testimony to the sociopolitical importance of Supe. Distributed along both sides of the valley for a distance of some forty kilometers, Caral is one of the five most extensive settlements built within a ten square-kilometer radius.

Around 2800 BC, the population of Supe, distributed among a series of settlements both on the coast and in the valley, exhibited a strong degree of occupational differentiation.

The coastal dwellers specialized in fishing and the extraction of mollusks and seaweed, while in the valley settlers opened up drainage canals to bring water down to their food crops and cotton fields.

The impact of its antiquity

Until the Middle archaic period the individual members of society lived in equality, notwithstanding certain distinctions based on kinship, age and some non-hereditary personal qualities.

The human remains from the period show similar levels of nutrition. From the beginning of the Late Archaic period, however, differences begin to appear among members of the same social group, which by this time had become hierarchical.

At Caral, houses vary in location, size and building material. Some homes are located in the nucleus of the city, whereas others are more marginalized. Some are built from stone and consist of several rooms, although the majority were made from wattle and daub.

The eighteen radiocarbon dates obtained and published recently in Science Magazine, aroused great interest among the scientific community and the general public, principally because of the earliest date recorded (that of 2627 BC, at Caral.), the complex sociopolitical organization, and the advanced knowledge in the fields of science, technology, art and architecture in what has been established as the oldest city in the Americas, and comparable only with the great focuses of civilization in the Old World, in Mesopotamia, Egypt and India.

In America, such results revive old questions regarding the conditions that made such early development possible in Peru.

There is interest in the Peruvian process all around the world, a process that occurred in total isolation from other contemporary cultural centers, unlike the major centers of development in the Old World.