April 27, 2001

                                     Archaeological Site in Peru Is Called Oldest City in
                                     Americas

                                     By HENRY FOUNTAIN

                                                 Researchers investigating a long-ignored
                                                 Peruvian archaeological site say they have
                                                 determined that it is the oldest city in the
                                     Americas, with a complex, highly structured
                                     society that flourished at the same time that the
                                     pyramids were being built in Egypt.

                                     The finding is forcing a re-evaluation of ideas
                                     about the rise of the earliest civilizations in the
                                     New World, particularly how and when ancient
                                     peoples moved from the coasts, with reliable
                                     ocean food sources, to inland settlements with
                                     less stable supplies of food.

                                     The vast site, called Caral, is one of about a dozen
                                     large sites in the Supe Valley, just inland from
                                     the Pacific coast in central Peru, 120 miles north
                                     of Lima. New radiocarbon dating shows that
                                     Caral flourished for five centuries, starting about
                                     2600 B.C., with public architecture (including six
                                     stone platform mounds up to 60 feet high),
                                     ceremonial plazas and irrigation — all signs of a
                                     society with strong, centralized leadership.

                                     "Now we've got to deal with these sites as being
                                     the earliest things going on in South America —
                                     by hundreds of years," said one of the researchers,
                                     Dr. Jonathan Haas, MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago.

                                     Dr. Shelia Pozorski, a professor at the University of Texas-Pan American who with her
                                     husband, Tom, has studied other Andean sites for 30 years, said the finding helped
                                     overturn what has been known as the maritime hypothesis. This is the idea that complex
                                     Andean societies, precursors of the Incas, evolved from the coast, where reliance on fishing
                                     required some level of social organization, to inland sites, developing fully only when
                                     ceramics appeared around 1800 to 1500 B.C.

                                     "It makes it more of a quantum leap, rather than a moderately rapid crawl," Dr. Pozorski
                                     said. "Rather than having coastal precursors to inland complexity, the two areas are
                                     developing at the same time."

                                     Another expert in Andean anthropology, Dr. Richard L. Burger, director of the Peabody
                                     Museum of Natural History at Yale, described the new work as "the nail in the coffin of the
                                     maritime hypothesis."

                                     Dr. Haas said that before the rise of Caral civilization in the region amounted to a few
                                     small coastal villages, with perhaps a hundred people or so in each, and other smaller
                                     bands of hunter-gatherers. By 2700 B.C., he said, several larger villages began to appear.

                                     "But then all of a sudden you've got Caral, and probably at least one of its neighbors," Dr.
                                     Haas said. "It's bigger by an order of magnitude than anything before." While it is not yet
                                     possible to estimate the population of Caral — much more archaeological work remains to
                                     be done — Dr. Haas said that the number was in the thousands, not hundreds.

                                     Dr. Haas studied Caral with his wife, Dr. Winifred Creamer, a professor of anthropology at
                                     Northern Illinois University, and Dr. Ruth Shady of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de
                                     San Marcos in Peru. Their paper dating and describing the site is being published today in
                                     the journal Science.

                                     Caral was first discovered by archaeologists about 1905, and has been explored only
                                     intermittently. The site's central area covers more than 150 acres and is dominated by the
                                     platform mounds, the largest of which is 450 by 500 feet at the base, and two sunken
                                     circular plazas, one of them 150 feet in diameter. There are also remains of several types of
                                     residential structures.

                                     Anthropologists have largely ignored Caral, considering it puzzling, Dr. Haas said.

                                     Pottery has never been found at the site, and its absence would ordinarily suggest that the
                                     civilization existed before 1800 B.C. But Dr. Haas said that for many experts the sheer size of
                                     the place — and the level of societal complexity that it implies — meant that it had to be
                                     newer. The consensus, he said, was that "something that big cannot be that early." So the
                                     lack of ceramics, by this way of thinking, was only an anomaly.

                                     But Dr. Haas and his colleagues felt that the lack of ceramics meant, in fact, that Caral was a
                                     pre-ceramic site. "All three of us had a fundamental belief that these sites were really
                                     early," he said.

                                     The belief was confirmed through the radiocarbon dating of plant fibers found at the site,
                                     including reeds that had been woven into loose sacks, known as shicra bags.

                                     Those bags played an essential role in the mound-building process. Caral's workers filled
                                     them with rocks at a hillside quarry, carried them on their shoulders more than a mile to
                                     the construction site and left them, bag and all, inside the mounds' retaining walls.

                                     Since the largest mound has a volume of more than 250,000 square yards, construction
                                     required many bags, and many highly organized workers.

                                     "This site just consumed labor," Dr. Haas said, and obviously had a lot to consume. Caral
                                     and nearby sites represented a flourishing, well- developed society, with enough food,
                                     other resources and organization to build these great mounds. "There's a surplus at these
                                     sites," Dr. Haas said, "and it's not going into storage of foodstuffs. It's going into
                                     construction."

                                     The people of Caral practiced agriculture, and given the arid conditions, the site's size and
                                     its location some 30 feet above the flood plain of the Supe River, they had to have used
                                     irrigation. A present-day irrigation canal nearby was almost certainly the site of an ancient
                                     one, Dr. Haas said.

                                     The inhabitants grew cotton and vegetables, including squash and beans. But
                                     archaeological work shows that they relied largely on fish and shellfish as their main
                                     source of protein, brought from the coast about 15 miles away. The remains of clams,
                                     sardines and anchovies were found at the site.

                                     Dr. Burger said the fact that much of the food came from the coast only reinforced the
                                     limitations of the maritime hypothesis.

                                     "There was an interdependence between shoreline sites rich in protein and agricultural
                                     sites rich in carbohydrates," Dr. Burger said. The Caral work, he added, shows that rather
                                     than a theory that has society developing in one area, development "has to be thought of
                                     in terms of a much larger, more diverse set of adaptations."