When people in England were standing up stones at Avebury and in other megalithic circles, people southeast of Lima and 20 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean were busy constructing complex cities.
We know this because of Ruth Shady's work. Since 1994 she has painstakingly been uncovering a city--Caral--that's close to 5000 years old. Early on, she enlisted the Peruvian army to help remove tons of sand, rubble and stones. For many years archeologists thought all those piles of sand were hills. Nope, Shady said. They're too symmetrical.
It turns out they are six huge stone pyramids older than Egypt’s. Each has a base the size of four football fields and the
largest is five stories tall. Around them are a large central amphitheater,
three sunken plazas, six large platform mounds, a furnace designed to burn an
eternal flame, apartment-style housing and other dwellings that occupy an area
of some 160 acres.
Of the eighteen recorded preceramic sites in the Supe
Valley, ten are more than 60 acres in size.
Shady believes that Caral, now a World Heritage Site, was likely the religious and administrative center for a culture that built many more still buried cities in the Supe valley and along the Pacific coast. They’d figured out how to build canals for irrigation, had many rivers and raised cotton. A lot of cotton. By carbon dating some of the cotton bags found there, they figure this city predates Machu Pichu by about 1000 years. They traded their cotton fishing nets for anchovies and sardines and in their lush gardens they grew squash, beans, avocadoes, potatoes, guava.
Like their successors, the Incas, they had no writing. Instead, they kept records by an intricate system of knots in strings. One such quipu found at Caral dates back to the earlier days of the city, nearly 5000 years ago. Ten thousand or more people lived here and from the clues left behind, Shady concludes they used various plants and drugs similar to those presently used in Peru for shamanic and visionary purposes. We can only speculate about their spiritual lives, but they did place little dried mud figurines in alcoves found in highly decorated houses.
Keep in mind, people lived in this pre-ceramic Garden of Eden peacefully
for over a thousand years and by the time the Spaniards cruised in with their
swords about 500 years ago, people were still leaving little gifts around the
perimeter, remembering with awe their ancestors. Shady’s team found no
battlements. No forts. No
mutilated bodies. No weapons of any kind.They didn't wage war!
Instead, they played music. Shady found flutes, similar to these much older ones found in China.
In 2001 researchers held the Archaeo-Musicological Research
Workshop for the Flutes of Caral and made music just as earlier people may have, surrounded by torches at night. The acoustics are
amazing. Whispers can be heard across the space.
What these people of Caral may have been telling us is that by living this way for a thousand years there is no need for war. All you need is creative enterprise, water to make sure there is enough food to go around. And music.
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