BIRTH OF CITY SLICKERS
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One of the earliest urban civilizations arose about 4200 B.C. in
Mesopotamia, the area of modern Iraq and eastern Syria between the
Tigris and Euphrates rivers. By comparison, the ancient Egyptian
civilization, with its immense pyramid structures and golden artifacts,
originated more than a thousand years later. Civilization is marked by complexity in tools, architecture, and crop production, all of which necessitate division of labor, explains NIU anthropologist Winifred Creamer. “People begin to specialize and fill niches in society,” she says. “When you talk about civilization, you have craftsmen, food producing people or farmers, merchants or traders, rulers, and religious people.” |
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Earlier this year, Creamer and her husband, Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago, with Ruth Shady Solis of San Marcos University in Lima, Peru, announced the discovery of the oldest known city in the Americas. Radiocarbon dating showed that the ruins of a once bustling city at Caral, Peru, date back to as early as 2627 B.C.—or about the same time as the great Egyptian pyramids. The discovery of Caral’s antiquity pushed back the known origin of civilization in the Americas by some 500 years.
Nestled in the Andes’ Supe Valley about 120 miles north of Lima, the ancient civilization of Caral was established 12 miles inland from the Peruvian coast. Caral’s ruins—buried under a layer of windblown sand and collapsed rock—are perched on a sand-dune terrace overlooking a river valley.
The site boasts six truncated or flattop pyramids, two sunken plazas, evidence of an irrigated agricultural system, and the remnants of upper-, middle-, and lower-status housing.
“This may actually be the birthplace of civilization in the Americas,” Creamer says. Caral is among the largest of 18 large archaeological sites in the Supe Valley. Archaeologists had known about Caral and its neighbors since the early 1900s, but because the sites lacked any ceramics—there was no pottery or gold to be found—they were largely overlooked. Pottery typically is an indicator of a civilized society, Creamer says, because early civilizations crafted ceramics used to cook food and store surpluses of wheat or grain.
While Caral lacked pottery, archaeologists found evidence of irrigation, domesticated plants, and large-scale cultivation of cotton. “Plant cultivation gives rise to civilization by enabling people to stay in one place longer,” Creamer says. Bones of anchovies and sardines showed these ancient Peruvians acquired fish from the coast, probably in some type of trade arrangement with coastal fishing villages.
Caral today is a remote outpost, sparsely populated and lacking in electricity, drinking water, and paved roads. “The real irony is that the peak of civilization in this area happened before 2000 B.C.,” Creamer says. “Nothing much has happened in this valley since.”
Time has a way of doing that, of building up and tearing down, of creating and recreating, of burying the past. Although the stories of our origins are often hidden, scientists at Northern are continuing to uncover the secrets of our past, shedding light on the history of our planet and ourselves.