mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Navigation bar Chicago Tribune June 19, 2001 Pyramids in Peru as old as in Egypt Area scientists excavate site from 2627 B.C. By William Mullen Tribune staff reporter April 27, 2001 Just at the time ancient Egyptians were erecting their first major pyramids along the Nile River 4,600 years ago, a heretofore unknown New World civilization began building huge pyramids near the coast of what is now Peru. That discovery, based on research by Chicago-area scientists and reported Friday in the research journal Science, indicates complex societies emerged in the Americas centuries earlier than previously thought. "This isn't something just a little earlier than other known early urban centers in this hemisphere--it's a lot earlier," said Field Museum anthropologist Jonathan Haas, who has been excavating the site with his wife, Northern Illinois University anthropologist Winifred Creamer, and a Peruvian colleague since 1999. "Something of this size doesn't occur anywhere else for another 1,000 years." "This may actually be the birthplace of civilization in the Americas," Creamer said. Site discovered in 1905 The site, in a remote desert area along the Supe River, was first discovered and recorded by archeologists in 1905, but lay ignored and unexamined for decades. It is near Caral, a farming village that to this day has no electricity or running water. The people who lived there thousands of years ago apparently rounded out a diet of fish, anchovies and sardines by cultivating beans, guava fruits, avocados, peanuts and the Andean plants lucuma and pacae. They also grew cotton for fishing nets but did not make pottery. "Because this was a pre-ceramic culture," said Haas, "this is not a rich site. There aren't the goodies here, the ceramics, gold, tombs and magnificent textiles that attracted archeologists to other places in Peru. "But the lack of riches also served not to draw looters and vandals, so we have something pristine to work with here." The most startling artifacts at Caral, one of 18 large sites in the area that the researchers believe were evolving at about the same time, are the huge stepped pyramid structures. The largest, dubbed "Pirimade Mayor," measures 500 feet long on two sides and 450 feet on the other two. It rises 60 feet, with a flat top that city builders covered with rooms, chambers, stairways, halls, altars and hearths for ceremonial activity. Pyramids built around plaza The largest pyramid and five others are arranged around a vast circular plaza 1,800 feet in diameter. The pyramids were built by filling woven reed sacks with river pebbles and piling them up, said Haas, then encasing the piles in trimmed, flat-faced rock. After adding a coat of plaster, the builders painted the pyramids in earth tones. "Rosy pink, light beige, light gray, blue gray and yellow," said Haas. "These things would have been magnificent in their glory." Researchers used radiocarbon dating on fibers from the sacks to establish that the pyramid construction took place as early as 2627 B.C. The first major cut stone pyramid by the ancient Egyptians, the stepped pyramid at Saqqara, was built about the same time. The building techniques and designs emerging in the two cultures bear little resemblance, however. "There is a higher level of technical sophistication in Egypt than at Caral," said Haas. "The Egyptian structures are much more complex in terms of engineering, building solid masses out of huge blocks of stone, with halls and rooms built into the interior. "The pyramids at Caral don't rise nearly as high, and the rooms are built on top of them." Still, it was not a surprise that the two cultures, separated by two continents and an ocean, began building monuments in the shape of pyramids at the same approximate time, Haas said. Simpler design than Giza's "It was a relatively simple form to construct," he said. "The shape of our pyramids at Caral are more like a ziggurat in Mesopotamia"--a flat-topped monumental structure built 5,000 years ago in present-day Iraq--"than like the pyramids in Giza." What does surprise anthropologists about Caral is that a big and highly organized society evolved there so early. "It is the earliest urban center we know of in this hemisphere, with monumental architecture and irrigation agriculture," Haas said. "It occupies more than 250 acres--anybody's definition of an urban center--with ceremonial and administrative precincts and residential areas of varying upper-, middle- and lower-class status." It took such a society to build not just the pyramids, but what is now the earliest known network of irrigation ditches in the Americas. The system, leading off the Supe River, allowed the ancient farmers to make the desert bloom. "We're talking about the very beginnings of complex society in this hemisphere," said Shelia Pozorski, an anthropologist at the University of Texas. She and her husband, Tom, for years have been excavating Peruvian sites where people first developed ceramics in this hemisphere, about 1800 B.C. Discovery a `major event' "Everybody is trying to find the first occurrence of [growing] maize in the Andes, the first occurrence of technology like ceramic-making, the first occurrence of whatever," said Pozorski. "It is a major event when you find a first of that magnitude, and Caral is in that vein. It is going to change the thinking of the patterns of settlement and development in the Andes." Caral, 120 miles north of Lima, is just 14 miles inland from the Pacific Coast and a string of ancient fishing settlements. Even in antiquity, that area of Peru probably had little in the way of game to hunt, so people relied on fish from the sea for protein, she said. The irrigation system and city that arose inland may have been to grow cotton for fishing nets, she said. Another key crop seems to have been gourds, not for food but as utensils for a society devoid of ceramic dishes, cups and containers. "Everywhere else in the world we have the assumption that the beginnings of settled farming and development of village life were accompanied by people making ceramics," said Creamer. "Why don't you find the same arrangement in Peru? They have agriculture and village life that did just fine without pottery." Peruvian researcher Ruth Shady began excavations in 1996, said Haas, but was hampered by a lack of funding. Attending a conference in Chicago, she invited Haas and Creamer to visit the Caral site. They went in 1999 and have been working with her since, also finding the funding for the key radiocarbon dating tests.