CARAL, PERU
Similar to the notion that penguins live only in Antarctica, it's amazing to me that we still so often equate pyramids only with the deserts of Egypt. In recent months during our travels we've stumbled upon pyramids in a variety of settings: Outside Cairo, of course, but also in the Canary Islands and here, today, in the high dry desert of central Peru.
THE SACRED CITY OF CARAL PYRAMID COMPLEX just a dozen miles up the SUPE VALLEY from the Pacific Ocean, was only discovered in 1948. It apparently preceded the sophisticated Incan civilization by some 4300 years. Built around 2900 BC (the Incas didn't get organized until sometime around 1440 AD), what is now known as the Supe-Caral civilization was in fact not far behind the Egyptian pyramid builders and preceded better-known civilized cultures in China, India and MesoAmerica. Today the busy Pan-American Highway zips by within a few miles.
Video link: BBC LEARNING: THE LOST PYRAMIDS OF CARAL
At the Caral site a 150-acre town featuring plazas, homes, amphitheaters and pyramids rises out of the sand, a 5,000-year-old city thought to be the oldest in the Americas. In the surrounding area another 20 or so pyramid complexes once existed. It appears at some point the Incas took over some of the towns, though there is no evidence of war. Rather, according to Caral's archeologists, it was most likely a peaceful, gentle society: Inside the tombs, rather than weapons were found flutes and trumpets carved from condor, pelican, deer and llama bones.
Walking the reconstructed pathways through the dry desert that link the reconstructed super-structures (its Pyramide Mayor covers an area nearly the size of four football fields and rises to 60 feet tall), it's not until you crest the high-point that you discover why they chose this place: Still today the Supe Valley leading to the ocean is green, unlike the brownness that surrounds. The river leading to the sea also explains how rounded river rocks came to be used in some of the construction and whalebones were found inside some of the pyramids interior rooms. Trading between the sea-and land-based cultures allowed both to boom: Anchovies and mussels for beans and sweet potatoes, for example. They knew exactly what they were doing when they committed a hundred years and millions of man-hours to pyramid-building here.
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