| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Horizons New World's First Cities Some 200 kilometers north of Lima, Peru, sprawls the most distinguished municipal dump in the New World. Piles of rotting food and household refuse mummify in the sun amid dun hills that tilt eastward into the Andes. More than 5,000 years ago, this desert site gave birth to what may be the very first city in the Americas. The citizens of what is today known as Aspero were not alone in their sophistication. Clustered along three adjacent river valleys and a narrow coastal plain are the remains of more than two dozen ancient urban settlements. Their towering ceremonial mounds, broad circular plazas, and scores of dwellings were constructed centuries before the rise of the Egyptian pyramids. Together, they would be the largest urban centers in the Americas for the next 1,500 years. It was definitely the heartland of New World civilization," says Sheila Pozorski, an expert in early Andean civilization at the University of Texas Panamerican. What originally drew people here was the sea. "Fishing comes first. It's the oldest profession in Peru," says Karen Wise, an expert on early Andean cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. Since prehistoric times, this stretch of South America has been blessed with the richest fishery in the world. The remains of ancient encampments indicate people have been fishing in coastal Peru for at least 12,000 years. Here, upwelling nutrients from deep, cold ocean waters power shimmering schools of sardines and anchovies and nourish rich beds of mussels and clams. Peru and Chile still rank third and fourth in the world in terms of annual seafood catch. Aspero is located next to the most bountiful waters on the Peruvian coast. In the 1960s, archeologist Michael Moseley poked through its middens, and found fish bones and mollusk shells piled several feet deep. He lifted out handwoven fishnets, made of sturdy cotton fibers knotted to gourd floats. A complete lack of ceramics strongly suggested the site predated the arrival of pottery in Peru around 1800 bc. At the time, anthropologists held that farmers grew the calories that fueled all major ancient civilizations. But the remains of Aspero tell a different story. "What we weren't seeing, and still don't see, is a focus on food plants, staples like maize or potatoes, that feed later civilizations. That stuff is still real scarce," Mosely says. Instead, these fishermen grew industrial crops-cotton for their nets, and reeds for their boats. Based on his findings, Moseley proposed a radical explanation for Aspero's precocious building spree. He claimed that calories from fishing, not farming, had enabled the people of Aspero to found a complex early civilization. The cultivation of cotton and reeds, and the ability to fish from the open ocean, clearly demanded a high level of social organization. The idea got a chilly reception. "I was roundly abused in the academic journals of perpetuating some myth," says Moseley, now with the University of Florida, Gainesville. Time, however, may have proved Moseley right. In 1996, archeologist Ruth Shady Solis of the National University of San Marcos, Peru, began digging at Caral, a site 23 kilometers up the Supe Valley from Aspero. If Aspero was a prosperous fishing town, Caral was New York City itself. Caral's largest platform mound towers some six stories high; the wedding-cake layers that make up its base cover an area equivalent to five football fields. The city contains five other large mounds as well, virtually all larger than those at Aspero. Some are topped by elaborate stone living quarters that housed elites near the civic center. Two sunken, circular stone plazas are believed to have been the site of long-forgotten public ceremonies. The mounds and plazas would become a signature of Andean architecture for the next several thousand years. Each mound was constructed by tossing river rocks and cut stone into shicra bags, mesh sacks woven from reeds. The bags were packed behind cut stone retaining walls. Vibrantly colored plaster covered each building. Refrigerator-sized rock stelae, or pillars, added to the grandeur of the plazas. And around the perimeter of the city, Shady found the barrios of common people. There were enough wooden pole-and-mud residences-construction methods still used in the region today-to house several thousand people. Like Aspero, Caral was built by a socially stratified civilization with plenty of labor and surplus food. Living this far inland, in a land spurned by rain, the people of Caral must have relied on irrigation agriculture to supplement their seafood diet. Researchers have found the remains of many domesticated plants, including squash, beans, sweet potato, chili, and a variety of fruits such as guava and avocado. In essence, they had made the shift from itinerant hunting, fishing, and gathering to settled irrigation agriculture-an epochal step on the road to modern civilization. The geography of the Supe Valley seems made for this transition. Here, the perennial snows of the Andes trickle down into a broad, flat terrace cut by the Rio Supe. "It's very easy to bring a canal from the river bottom over to plots of land that can be irrigated," says Jonathan Hass, an archaeologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. "It's easier here than anyplace else. Digging a few channels all of a sudden opened up big field areas where they could grow crops not native to this area." In fact, a canal in current use located next to the river and just outside the city is thought to be the same one used by the farmers of Caral. After years of excavations, Shady enlisted the assistance of Haas and his wife, anthropologist Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University, to radiocarbon date her finds. The reed bags used to build Caral demonstrated that the city's largest monuments had been built in just two short phases, not assembled gradually over hundreds of years. In 2001, the researchers reported in the journal Science that Caral had been occupied between 2627 and 2020 bc-pushing back the emergence of urban life in the Americas by 800 years. "The new dates put Aspero in a new perspective: as part of an economic exchange system with even larger sites inland," says anthropologist Thomas Pozorski of the University of Texas Panamerican. "Inland cities were growing crops that were traded for marine resources in coastal sites." In fact, the diets of both populations seemed strangely similar. Caral's middens, or garbage piles, were also lined with mussel shells. The fecal remains of its people bristled with needle-fine anchovy and sardine bones. For a people located a day's walk inland, the residents of Caral consumed huge quantities of seafood. Both sites seemed to have a similar suite of cultivated plant foods. But these were scarce compared to seafood remains. Moseley says these findings validate his hypothesis. "In theory, Aspero is the earliest of the big Supe sites, and then people moved progressively inland," Moseley says. "To expand their fishing capabilities [and make nets and boats], people needed to do more farming. Though it's less convenient, they had to move up the valley." In the winter of 2004, Haas, Creamer, and Alvaro Ruiz, also of Northern Illinois University, published new carbon dates taken from 20 other large urban sites near Caral. Their results, reported in the journal Nature, pushed the record of urban occupation in the region back by another 500 years, to about 3100 BC. Located in the neighboring Supe, Patavilca, and Fortaleza Valleys, all the sites have the circular plazas, mounds, and lack of ceramics that mark Caral and Aspero. All were constructed within a century of one another, and continuously inhabited for about 1,200 years. The findings establish without a doubt that the people of the central coast of Peru, a region Haas and colleagues call the Norte Chico, had by far the most advanced civilization in the Americas at the time. In fact, the central coast of Peru was one of only six places in the world-including Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, and Mexico-where the first cities were built. Caral turns out to be just one of the sites that blossomed during this time period. It documents the idea that this was a regional phenomenon, that a set of three interconnected valleys are part of this cultural phenomenon," Haas says. "If you looked at the 20 largest sites in the New World at that time, all 20 were in the Norte Chico." Norte Chico has so many ancient inland cities that archeologists are wondering where all their seafood came from. Isotope analysis of mussel and clam shells from inland middens should pinpoint their precise coastal origins. Additional studies of human skeletal remains from cemeteries around many of the cities should tell how much of their diet came from the land versus the waters of the Pacific. These findings should help settle the debate over whether this civilization truly owes its roots to the sea. Kathleen M. Wong is Senior Editor of California Wild. |