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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.

The excavation also underscores the archaeological potential of more
than a dozen unexplored sites buried for millennia beneath a carpet of
sand in Peru's Supe Valley, a remote desert basin fed by a river from
the distant mountains.

"Besides Caral, there also appear to be four other sites you can see
from one to another," said Northern Illinois University's Winifred
Creamer, a member of the archaeological team that reported its
findings today in the journal Science. "If they are contemporaneous,
we are looking at thousands of people in the valley at a very early
date."

A research team, led by Ruth Shady Solis of Lima's University of San
Marcos, examined a 160-acre area containing six large pyramids grouped
around a central plaza, plus several smaller pyramids with houses
perched on top, a large number of more modest adobe houses and the
remains of less permanent shelters made of wattle -- reeds daubed and
stiffened with mud.

Unlike other pyramid sites in the Americas, where ceremonial
structures are isolated from residences, Creamer said Caral appeared
to be a fully integrated community, with the pyramid area "very much
the center of town."

What sets Caral apart from other sites is its unusual mix of
technological simplicity and organizational sophistication. The site
is "pre-ceramic," with no pottery, and Creamer said the team had found
no evidence of elaborate burials or fancy ornaments. The few artifacts
recovered are made of bone or wood, she said, and tools are crudely
fashioned digging and grinding stones.

Also absent is any evidence that Caral's residents cultivated a staple
crop like corn or potatoes -- basic foods of the Andes whose presence
can be a tip-off that a hunting and gathering community is developing
a more complex socioeconomic organization.

Instead, the Caral team found traces of guava, squash, beans, a podded
tree fruit known today as pacay, and a local stone fruit called
lucuma. Gourds were used to hold water, and woven meshes of reeds
served as carry-alls.

Unlike the celebrated Egyptian pyramids, Caral's monuments were
relatively simple structures -- rectangular retaining walls of fitted
stones, fronted with mud plaster and filled with reed bags full of
rocks carried from the Supe River.

Creamer said all the pyramids were terraced, and had a stone staircase
running up one of the faces, much like Mayan pyramids, "except much
bigger." She noted that Caral's largest pyramid is not "remarkably
high," at 60 feet, but the base -- 500 feet long and 450 feet wide --
is "huge" by American standards.

Creamer explained that monumental architecture by its very nature
indicates the presence of a large population and a hierarchical
division of labor -- many people carry stones, while others supervise.

Furthermore, the team found evidence that the people of Caral
cultivated cotton and irrigated it with a canal dug from the Supe
River. The proliferation of fish bones -- anchovies and sardines, for
the most part -- suggests a barter economy with fishermen from the
Pacific coast 14 miles away.

"This had to be a complex system, because we think the inland people
were growing cotton, making it into string and trading it to the
people of the coast" in exchange for fish, Creamer said. "They sound
like Neolithic people, except they are Neolithic textile
technologists."

The discoveries at Caral added a new dimension to a theory advanced 30
years ago by archaeologist Michael Moseley that Peru's coastal
civilization was sea-focused and developed independently of the later
mountain cultures.

"The magnitude of Caral and the inland location is a surprise," said
Moseley, now at the University of Florida. "What's neat is that the
focus on cotton rather than staples fits with the maritime scenario.
The sea can feed you, but can't clothe you."

Until the Caral discoveries, the best known site in the region was a
third millennium B.C. coastal fishing village excavated by Moseley. He
described a fishing economy based on fine-mesh nets and small reed
boats similar to a type known today as caballitos -- "little horses."

The cold waters of the Humboldt Current are some of the richest
fisheries in the world, teeming with anchovies and sardines in shallow
waters, home of giant tuna further offshore.

Moseley suggested that the coastal residents traded fish to Caral for
cotton to make fishing nets and lines, and gourds to use as floats, an
integrated commerce that provides further evidence of a complex
society.

"What you don't have is the fancy artifacts and all the other bells
and whistles," Moseley said, but this is not necessarily surprising.
"People are farming or fishing. You only get a focus on personal
wealth with the onset of staple agriculture."

Staples can be stored or hoarded, and given a value, he said, but
Caral's world was a simpler one where a relatively few people could
thrive: "If they ate nothing but anchovies, and harvested the stock at
40 percent, the sea could have supported 6 million people."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company