Caral–Supe civilization

On a narrow strip of desert coast north of Lima, in the valleys of the Supe, Pativilca and Fortaleza rivers, people built monumental platform mounds and sunken plazas about five thousand years ago. This society, now called Caral–Supe after its best-studied city and also known as Norte Chico, flourished from the late fourth millennium BCE to about 1800 BCE. It is regarded as the oldest known civilisation in the Americas, older than the Olmecs by nearly two thousand years, and it achieved this without pottery.

The archaeologist Max Uhle came across the Caral site in 1905 but did not recognise its hills as buildings, and when Paul Kosok studied it in 1948 others doubted his claims about its age. Aspero, on the coast at the mouth of the Supe, was re-examined in the 1970s. In the 1990s a Peruvian team led by Ruth Shady began extensive excavations at Caral, and a paper in Science in 2001, followed by a 2004 article in Nature reporting radiocarbon dates across the region, made the culture's importance widely known. Until then the Chavín culture, of around 900 BCE, had been considered the first civilisation of Peru.

Dates are a central debate. Jonathan Haas and colleagues found that 10 of 95 radiocarbon samples from the Pativilca and Fortaleza valleys predated 3500 BCE; the oldest, from 9210 BCE, is only a faint hint of early settlement, and two dates of 3700 BCE linked to communal buildings are probably anomalous. Large-scale settlement and building are clear from about 3200 or 3100 BCE, and the earliest date securely tied to a city, 3500 BCE, comes from Huaricanga in the Fortaleza valley. Shady's dates for Caral itself run from 2627 to 2020 BCE, the earliest based on reed carrying bags packed into the masonry. Decline set in around 1800 BCE as new centres rose elsewhere, and work published in 2025 links the abandonment of Caral to a long drought around 2200 BCE, after which people appear to have moved to sites such as Vichama on the coast rather than simply vanishing.

Some thirty major centres are known, densely packed into the valleys. Their builders raised stepped platform mounds and circular sunken courts from quarried stone and river cobbles, carried in bags of woven grass called shicra. The people made no ceramics and left almost no visual art. They did make textiles, and finds include flutes of pelican and condor bone and a knotted string device that its excavators identify as an early quipu, the recording system later used by the Inca Empire. A gourd dated to 2250 BCE bears what may be the earliest image of the Staff God, a deity of later Andean cultures, though its meaning is disputed.

Since 1973 Michael Moseley has argued that fish and shellfish, rather than farming, underpinned the rise of Andean civilisation, implying that coastal Aspero came first. Haas and others counter that inland and coastal sites developed together, and that cotton, grown by irrigation inland and essential for fishing nets, gave inland elites their power. Research reported in 2013 suggested maize was a primary food between 3000 and 1800 BCE, a claim that remains contested. A 2022 study of bones from 52 people found that plants supplied most of the diet, roughly 55 to 68 per cent at Aspero and over 70 per cent at Caral, below the threshold Moseley had set for his theory.

Archaeologists have found no fortifications, weapons or signs of violent death from this period, which is unusual for a society with such evident central organisation. How it was governed is uncertain; Haas proposes rule based on control of cotton and food and on religious authority, a view others think overstated. Credit for the discovery has also been disputed: Shady accused her American co-authors of taking credit for her work, and although they were cleared of plagiarism, the Field Museum in Chicago criticised Haas for understating her role.

Our maps for 3000 and 2000 BCE draw Caral–Supe under the label "Norte Chico", as an approximate area on the north-central coast of Peru. On the 2000 BCE map the Chinchorro culture lies to the south and the Valdivia culture to the north.