Caral

Caral, also called the Sacred City of Caral-Supe, is the ruin of an early city in the Supe Valley of north-central Peru, about 182 kilometres north of Lima and 23 kilometres inland from the Pacific. Occupied from roughly 2600 to 2000 BCE, it was the principal centre of the Caral–Supe civilization, the oldest known complex society in the Americas. Its excavators describe it as the oldest city in the Americas, a claim others have questioned, and its platform pyramids were being raised at about the same time as the great pyramids of Egypt.

Caral belonged to a cluster of as many as thirty centres in the river valleys of the Peruvian coast, a culture that flourished from the fourth to the second millennium BCE. Large-scale building is clearly visible from around 3100 BCE, and the date of about 2627 BCE for Caral itself comes from radiocarbon tests on reed bags used to carry stones for its temples; older parts of the site have not yet been dated. The society made no pottery, and its economy rested on irrigation farming fed by Andean rivers. Cotton, grown for fishing nets and textiles, was its key crop, and anchovies and other fish from the coast reached even the inland settlements.

The city was laid out in two parts on either side of a natural division in the valley. The upper part held six monumental complexes, each built around a pyramid with a plaza and housing for an elite who ate rarer foods such as sea lion. The lower part contained smaller pyramids, a complex called the Temple of the Amphitheatre, and simpler multi-purpose homes for working people whose diet was mainly plants with some fish. Many archaeologists read this plan as a deliberate expression of social inequality. The largest platform, the Great Pyramid, is about 150 to 160 metres long by different accounts, with published heights ranging from about 18 to 28 metres, and some buildings seem to have been raised in one or two intense phases, suggesting leaders able to command labour.

About 3,000 people may have lived in Caral, and nineteen other sites in the Supe Valley could have brought the population sharing its culture to some 20,000. Ruth Shady, who led the excavations, argues that Caral was the focus of this network and that it traded with the coast, the highlands and perhaps the Amazon.

The most striking feature of the site is what is missing. No fortifications, weapons or remains showing signs of battle have been found. Finds include flutes and cornetts made from bird, deer and llama bone, a knotted cord that the excavators identify as an early quipu, the recording device later used widely by the Inca Empire, and a geoglyph of a face with streaming hair on the desert floor nearby. Not all ritual was peaceful: some burials point to human sacrifice, including one of the earliest known examples in the Andes.

The civilisation faded around 1800 BCE as stronger centres arose elsewhere on the coast and in the highlands. The anthropologist Winifred Creamer has suggested that people moved to more fertile lands, carrying their irrigation skills with them. Caral itself was left earlier, and in 2025 Shady's team linked its abandonment to a long drought around 2200 BCE, arguing that its people relocated to sites such as Vichama on the coast and Peñico inland rather than simply disappearing. About a thousand years passed before the next major Peruvian culture, the Chavín, emerged.

The archaeologist Max Uhle came across the site in 1905 but did not recognise its mounds as pyramids. Paul Kosok studied it in 1948, but colleagues doubted that so large a place could be so old, and the Peruvian architect Carlos Williams recorded it in 1975. Systematic work began in the 1990s under Shady, and a 2001 paper in the journal Science made Caral internationally famous; the project later led to a bitter dispute over credit between Shady and two American co-authors. UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List in 2009. It remains vulnerable to modern encroachment, and in 2021 tensions arose between archaeologists and squatters claiming land rights as housing encroached on the site.