SOCIETY

Caral: the First City of the Americas

~2600 BCE

History · Bronze Age · Holocene · Northgrippian

Caral, in the Supe Valley of Peru, raised monumental buildings and irrigated its fields from about 2600 BCE, the oldest city in the Americas.

Caral occupies a terrace in the Supe Valley of Peru, 23 kilometres inland from the Pacific, where a central zone of monumental, residential and non-residential architecture covers 65 hectares. Radiocarbon dates published in 2001 place monumental building, urban settlement and irrigation agriculture there between 2627 and 1977 calibrated years BC. Caral counts among eighteen large preceramic sites recorded in that valley, and fieldwork in the neighbouring Fortaleza and Pativilca valleys later added 95 dates from thirteen more, confirming a cultural complex running from 3000 to 1800 cal BC. These settlements share large-scale monumental architecture, extensive residential quarters and no ceramics: platform mounds and ceremonial plazas were raised by people who made no pots. Whether the largest of them counts as a city remains discussed, some authors reading Caral as a ritual and ceremonial centre.

Why it matters

Urban life in the Americas thus begins without pottery. The Norte Chico settlements joined irrigation farming in the valleys to fishing on the coast, and the excavators present their dates as a redefinition of the respective roles of these two economies at the beginnings of civilisation in South America. Haas and Creamer describe the outcome as a regional sphere of interaction, with a dominant political nexus in Norte Chico and coastal fishing communities taking part along the shore, rather than as one capital ruling a hinterland.

Dating & uncertainty

Two spans coexist. Radiocarbon at Caral itself runs from 2627 to 1977 calibrated years BC, so the figure carried here, ~2600 BCE, marks the start of monumental building at a single site and not the age of the whole complex. Across the four valleys of Norte Chico, Late Archaic occupation runs from 3000 to 1800 cal BC. Which span is quoted decides whether Caral is called the first urban centre of the Americas or one of the earliest among more than twenty sites of comparable age.

Our species’ history as one day

23:38:5821 min 2 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day