History

Caral was first noted in the archaeological literature in the 1940s and 1970s, but its enormous earthen mounds were dismissed by most researchers as natural hills, and a lack of ceramics led early surveyors to assign it a late or minor date. The systematic excavations begun in 1994 by Ruth Shady Solís of the National University of San Marcos changed everything. Shady recovered organic material — woven rush bags (shicras) used to carry fill material during construction — whose radiocarbon dates, when confirmed by the laboratories of Jonathan Haas at the Field Museum in Chicago and Winifred Creamer at Northern Illinois University in 2001, produced dates clustering around 2627 BC. This placed Caral squarely in the same historical moment as the Old Kingdom of Egypt (the Giza Pyramid complex was built c. 2560–2540 BC) and Sumerian Ur, transforming the understanding of the parallel development of complex societies worldwide.

The Norte Chico civilisation that built Caral and its sister cities operated on a singular economic logic. The coastal communities fished anchovies in vast quantities — the same anchovy fishery that sustains Peru’s modern fishing industry — and traded dried fish inland to the river valley settlements of Caral in exchange for cotton and other agricultural products. Cotton was the critical commodity: it was woven into fishing nets, which enabled more fish, which enabled more cotton. This coastal-inland exchange network, not the cultivation of maize or other grains, appears to have been the engine that generated sufficient surplus to support a non-farming specialist class capable of engineering and constructing monumental architecture. Caral had no grain storage; its economy was maritime before it was agricultural.

The city appears to have been abandoned gradually rather than violently around 1800 BC, possibly due to climate change (evidence of El Niño-driven flooding and drought in the region) or a shift in trade routes. Unlike Mohenjo-daro or the later Mesoamerican cities, Caral shows no evidence of having been destroyed or conquered. UNESCO inscribed the site as a World Heritage property in 2009 under the name “Sacred City of Caral-Supe,” recognising it as “the oldest centre of civilisation in the Americas and one of the earliest in the world.”