Posted on 10/23/2006 12:14:18 PM PDT by blam
For archeology buffs, Caral is a chance to begin at the beginning
By Leslie Josephs
ASSOCIATED PRESS
A sudden wind gust blows eerily down from rocky Andean foothills, kicking up a cinnamon-colored cloud over the moonscape of ruins that is the oldest city in the Americas.
The sky is a crisp blue. All around in the Supe River Valley are lush fields of onion and corn.
We are in Caral, three hours and nearly 5,000 years from contemporary Lima, Peru's bustling capital, and we've spent the last half-hour or so on a bumpy drive from the coast, along a dirt road blocked periodically by bleating herds of goats and sheep.
Caral made headlines in 2001 when researchers carbon-dated material from the city back to 2627 B.C. It is a must-see for archaelogy enthusiasts.
Even though the ruins in the dusty, wind-swept Supe River Valley don't approximate in majesty the mountains that surround the famed Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, they are an unforgettable sight under the glow of a fiery sunset.
Dotted with pyramid temples, sunken plazas, housing complexes and an amphitheater, Caral is one of 20 sites attributed to the ancient Caral-Supe culture that run almost linearly from Peru's central coast inland up the Andes.
The ruins changed history when researchers proved that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt - 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.
But much remains to be discovered about Caral and the Caral-Supe culture that flourished here for more than a thousand years.
Ruth Shady, a Peruvian archaeologist from San Marcos University, discovered Caral in 1994, and was stunned by its size and complexity.
"Caral combined size with construction volume, but also it was a planned city," she says.
Shady and her team continue working at Caral but she also dedicates her time to promoting the project with Peru's National Culture Institute as a tourist and educational destination.
Caral received some 21,000 visitors in 2005, up from about 7,000 in 2003, the Commission for the Promotion of Peru says.
The ruins offer a front-row seat to archaeology in action, as scientists dust off piles of rock or supervise the reconstruction of a crumbling pyramid wall that thousands of years ago gleamed red, yellow or white.
The ancient society comes to life with the help of these archeologists, who make up about half of the site's tour guides along with locals whom they have trained.
The 163-acre city was the administrative center for a complex civilization.
While only crudely reconstructed, the society's clear class distinctions are evident in the wide variety of home sizes and neighborhoods.
One complex thought to have housed farmers was partly excavated on the outskirts of Caral, on a dry and inhospitable patch of land, while a spacious home for wealthy families was built beside the important and impressive Huanca Pyramid, with its steep staircases that narrow as they reach the structure's flat top.
Caral's largest social class was dedicated to agricultural production, Shady says. Farmers, using irrigation canals, nourished their crops of pumpkin, squash, sweet potatoes, corn, chili peppers and cotton with the waters from the Supe River.
Musicians played flutes crafted from pelican and condor skeletons and horns made from llama or alpaca bones in the city's amphitheater.
Shady has also uncovered evidence of extensive trading. Shrimp and mollusks from Peru's coast have been found at Caral.
Caral-Supe residents capitalized on the various climate zones they inhabited by growing a wide variety of foods. The region's agriculture and fishing industries complemented each other.
"They managed an economy that articulated the productivity" of the various regions, Shady says.
Painstaking detective work and reconstruction is necessary, as these archeologists, little by little, uncover a lost world.
The Caral-Supe ruins are far from intact, unlike many of Peru's famed Inca ruins that date back half a millennium and are scattered throughout Peru's Sacred Valley in the Andean state of Cuzco.
Machu Picchu in nearby Cuzco is, of course, the country's top tourist destination.
Aspero, another major Caral-Supe site on Peru's central coast, 16 miles from Caral, was discovered in 1905 but its pyramids were thought to be naturally formed hills. A garbage dump was built on top of it, and as Shady's team excavates, trash needs to be cleared away.
They have discovered that fishermen from Aspero provided sardines, anchovies, and other fish for the sprawling culture.
"We're going to be able to learn about the social system, the economic and political organization, the ideology," Shady said of the excavations throughout the Supe Valley.
"It's very important because it's the oldest civilization in America. And for that reason, native peoples see it as a symbol that in America there had been the same capacity to create civilizations as ancient as in the Old World."
Hey, I never noticed that...certainly appears that way.
Beg to differ. 'Cod' is archaic slang for 'penis'; a 'codpiece', for instance, is a genital pouch. 'Codswallop' is that which is produced by walloping the penis, a substance of little esteem which delicacy forbids us from describing further.
Like the meteorites, water borne gravel would have its own unique characteristics and hopefully the archaeologists would have checked.
Among other things it would be more random in distribuution, occurring outside as well as inside structures.
What I'll be glad to grant you is that the interpretations may have been made within a biased set of preconceptions that would have ignored some of the issues you raise. I've seen a lot of that.
Stephen Oppenheimer, in his book, Eden In The East, does make all the connections. He says they have a common origin, SE Asia.
There are several representations of Aztecs where the hair appears blond (yellow) or brown and curly. I'll see what I can google up.
Read this thread here.
If you're not aware, Shady, Haas and Haas's wife had a public row over this site. Shady acussed Haas and his wife of stealing the 'spotlight' on this discovery, etc. I think it's settled down some but Haas is now working on another site closer to the coast, and not with Shady.
like 'Tells' in the Middle East?
I think Tells are different than the pyramids at Caral. The Tells have several distinct levels of occupation...I think Caral shows only one level of occupation.
Tell Ubaid, for example.
http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IS/SANDERS/PHOTOS/meso_map.html
On the other hand, the citizens of Babylon might have covered it all up themselves before they left...LOL! (with a litle sarc/)
“I put them up in my house,” says Shady. “I drove them around in my car. I didn’t realize that these people were delinquents.”
Ouch!
Clearly this is the work of Cthulhu.
Uh, no, it's gray. It's a carving, LOL. ;o)
Stephen Oppenheimer, in his book, Eden In The East, does make all the connections...
-----
I would love to read it, but we don't have Amazon in Oz yet. Pity.
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
In an exhaustively researched and creatively argued reassessment of mankind's origins, British physician Oppenheimer, an expert in tropical pediatrics, contends that the now-submerged area of Southeast Asia was the cradle of ancient civilization.
From time to time, scholars from various disciplines have argued for the existence of a vastly old ``founder civilization.'' Among the most famous was Charles Hapgood, who based his theory of a lost seafaring civilization on his analysis of the famous 16th-century ``Piri Re'is'' maps of the Antarctic land mass.
In this tradition, Oppenheimer blends evidence from geology, genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology to argue persuasively that such a civilization existed on a submerged land mass in Southeast Asia, which geologists call the Sunda shelf.
Pointing to geological evidence for the submersion of the shelf by abrupt rises in the sea level about 8,000 years ago, Oppenheimer contends that the coastal cultures of Southeast Asia were drowned by a great flood, reflected in flood mythologies scattered from the ancient Middle East (such as the biblical story of Noah) to Australia and the Americas. According to the author, tantalizing archaeological evidence exists of settlements under a ``silt curtain'' left by the sea floods in drowned coastal regions from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, while linguistic markers indicate that languages spread from Southeast Asia to Australia and the Pacific.
The shared flood story is one striking example of similar Eurasian myths according to the author; the ancient Middle East and Asia share other myth typologies, conspicuously including creation and Cain and Abel myths, which point to common origins in a progenitor culture.
Absorbing, meticulously researched, limpidly written, and authoritative: should be regarded as a groundbreaking study of the remote past of Southeast Asia, and of civilization itself. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
A book that completetly changes the established and conventional view of prehistory by relocating the Lost Eden - the world's 1st civilisation - to SouthEast Asia.
At the end of the Ice Age, SouthEast Asia formed a continent twice the size of India, which included Indochina, Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. The South China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand and the Java sea, which were all dry, formed the connecting parts of the continent.
Geologically, this half sunken continent is the Shunda shelf or Sundaland. In the Eden in the East Stephen Oppenheimer puts forward the astonishing argument that here in southeast Asia - rather than in Mesopotamia where it is usually placed - was the lost civilisation that fertilised the Great cultures of the Middle East 6 thousand years ago.
He produces evidence from ethnography, archaeology, oceanography, from creation stories, myths and sagas and from linguistics and DNA analysis, to argue that this founder civilisation was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age.
Thanks.
"...this founder civilisation was destroyed by a catastrophic flood, caused by a rapid rise in the sea level at the end of the last ice age."
A Catastrophic Flood, most definitely:
http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/floods/mfloods.html
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