Caral: the oldest cities of the Americas
On the coast of Peru, in the same age as the pyramids of Egypt, cities rise with plazas and platform mounds—the oldest in the Americas.
Around 2600 BCE Caral stands in the Supe valley on the coast of Peru: a city with round plazas, stepped platform mounds several storeys high and residential quarters, with some twenty settlements of the same kind nearby. The people grow cotton and gourds, fish, and trade the fish for cotton with their neighbours; there is no pottery yet, and accounts are kept with knotted cords. No walls and no weapons have been found. These are the oldest cities of the Americas—older than the Olmecs by fifteen centuries, contemporary with the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the first cities of Sumer. Around 1800 BCE Caral empties.
Sources
Documents of the period
- the excavations of Caral and the Supe valley — the plazas, the mounds and the knotted-cord accounts
Scholarship
- archaeology of the Andes — the dating to about 2600 BCE and the place among the cities of the Americas
Basis: documents and evidence.