Caral — the oldest city in the Americas
Pyramids in Peru while the pyramids rise in Egypt
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Caral in the Supe valley dates to around 2600 BCE and belongs to Norte Chico, the oldest complex society in the Americas. It is contemporary with Egypt's Old Kingdom and the Indus civilisation, and older than China's first dynasties. The combination is unusual: monumental architecture without pottery, without writing and without evidence of warfare. Its economy tied inland cotton growing to coastal fishing — the nets needed cotton, the catch fed the farmers. The excavations of the 1990s pushed the story of American civilisation back by a millennium and a half.
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In a dry valley in Peru, people built a city with six great pyramids, plazas and houses — at about the same time as the Egyptians built theirs. But archaeologists have found not a single weapon here, and no city wall. They traded for fish from the coast and grew cotton to make netting.
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