Caral and the Origins of Andean Civilization

The earliest signs of complex civilizations in the Americas are in Peru. Urban sites with large pyramids have been found both in the coastal deserts and in mountain valleys that date to before 2,000 BC. The exact dates are subject to some debate, so we don't really know whether the coastal or mountain sites came first. 

The oldest urban site yet documented in the Andes is Caral, or, as Peruvian government tourist material has it, The Scared City of Caral-Supe. The site is in the Supe valley, about 110 miles (180 km) north of Lima and 15 miles from the sea. The usual dates for the site are 2600 to 2000 BC. You may see "more than 5,000 years old" at tourist sites and the like, but that seems to be the date of the first occupation of the site by villagers.

The city of Caral was split into two sections, which are generally called the "Upper Half" and the "Lower Half". These halves were divided by the Supe River. The main temple complexes and the palaces of the elite were in the Upper Half, which most ordinary folks seem to have lived in the Lower Half. The population is estimated to have been about 3,000.

There are six major pyramids and many smaller mounds in the Upper Half. The biggest pyramid (shown at the top of the post) is 490 feet by 360 feet by 92 feet tall. 

The smaller mounds seem to have lifted the dwellings of the elite a the humbler homess of their servants.

The one monumental building in the Lower Half is the Temple of the Amphitheater. 

Excavations within the amphitheater have yielded 32 flutes made of pelican and condor bones (including these) and 37 trumpets made of deer and llama bones.  

This was a stone age civilization, with no evidence of metal working in any form. With no gold to get people excited, there aren't many photographs of artifacts online.

Most sites show only these two figurines, who have become the mascots of the site's tourist industry. If they had pottery it must have been boring, since I can't find any pictures of it.

These come from the Caral culture but not Caral itself, but since I can't find much else, here they are.

Excavations at Caral have not yielded much evidence of maize, but they have produced thousands of fragments of cotton (raw, string, cloth). It seems that one thing the people produced was cotton fishing nets, which they traded to coastal people for food (lots of fish bones have been found). This much disputed artifact may be a quipu, the knotted cords used by the Inca to transmit and record information, but not everyone accepts that.

The city seems to have declined and fallen between 2000 and 1800 BC. The reasons are obscure; lately people have been citing climate change, specifically a long-lasting drought, but these days archaeologists blame everything on climate change and I am dubious. So far as I can tell the only evidence that there was such a drought is the decline of the town.

Anyway it seems like a wonderful site, and I hope more will be revealed about its rise and fall in years to come.