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.







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