Caral / Norte Chico
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Caral, also called Norte Chico, was a complex society on the coast of Peru that flourished from about 3500 to 1800 BCE, contemporary with the pyramids of Egypt and with Uruk in Mesopotamia. The Sacred City of Caral, excavated by Ruth Shady from 1996, covers 66 hectares and holds six large platform mounds, sunken circular plazas and residential terraces arranged around open spaces. The largest mound is comparable in volume to the great pyramids of the old world. What makes the society unusual is the absence of any evidence of warfare: no fortifications, no weapons, no depiction of conflict, and the burials show little violence. The people farmed cotton for nets and made textiles, grew guava, squash and beans, and fished the Pacific with nets and floats; anchovies and sardines were consumed in quantity, though no pottery has been found. The platform mounds were ceremonial rather than defensive, and the plazas held assemblies. Caral shows that monumental architecture and social complexity can arise without war, and it pushed the history of civilisation in the Americas back more than a thousand years. The society lasted for more than a thousand years and then declined as the rivers it depended on shifted or failed.