Monumental urbanism at Caral and the Norte Chico civilisation
- Date
- c. 2600 BCE
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- Central Coast, Peru (Supe Valley)
- Era
- Ancient Civilizations
- Significance
Along Peru's arid central coast, the Norte Chico (Caral–Supe) culture built the oldest known civilisation in the Americas, with large-scale communal construction clearly apparent from around 3100 BCE and the flagship city of Caral flourishing about 2600 BCE.
Caral covered more than 60 hectares and featured six monumental platform mounds (pyramids), sunken circular plazas, large staircases and planned residential sectors, raised at roughly the same era as Egypt's earliest pyramids. The society depended on extensive canal irrigation of the Supe valley, growing cotton that was traded with coastal fishing communities for anchovies and shellfish, an early example of interdependent inland-maritime economy. Remarkably, Norte Chico developed this complexity apparently without ceramics or a writing system, instead using textiles and knotted-cord quipu-like devices for record-keeping; a possible early quipu was recovered at Caral. The civilisation is now counted among the small set of places where complex society arose independently, alongside Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus, China and Mesoamerica, demonstrating that monumental, state-level organisation emerged in the Western Hemisphere far earlier than once believed.
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Related politics & governance events
- Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Narmerc. 3100 BCE
- Rise of Sumerian city-states and kingshipc. 2900–2350 BCE
- Rise of Kerma as an Urban Centre in Nubiac. 2500 BCE
- Sargon of Akkad founds the world's first empirec. 2334 BCE
- Reforms of Urukagina of Lagashc. 2350 BCE
- Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest surviving law codec. 2100 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Best-selling reappraisal of the sophisticated societies of the pre-Columbian Americas.
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