Posted on 12/23/2004 9:49:50 AM PST by blam
Thursday, December 23, 2004 - Page updated at 12:03 A.M.
Ancient Peru site older, much larger
By Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
A Peruvian site previously reported as the oldest city in the Americas actually is a much larger complex of as many as 20 cities with huge pyramids and sunken plazas sprawled over three river valleys, researchers report.
Construction started about 5,000 years ago — nearly 400 years before the first pyramid was built in Egypt — at a time when most people around the world were simple hunters and gatherers, a team from Northern Illinois University and Chicago's Field Museum reports in today's issue of the journal Nature.
The society and its people — known only as the Andeans — persisted in virtually the same form for 1,200 years before they were overrun by more warlike neighbors. That is the longest time any known ancient civilization survived, according to archaeologist Jonathan Haas of the Field, who led the expedition.
The results greatly expand understanding of how complex states began in the Americas.
"We are seeing the emergence of centralized decision-making, government and religion out of pristine conditions," Haas said. "They were not following a pattern established by someone else. They were developing it on their own. An Andean culture was being invented in this area."
Haas said people always have thought the Americas were behind Europe, Africa and Asia in terms of developing civilizations. The new dates for the region show the two worlds developed more or less simultaneously.
The findings also are overturning the previous belief that South American civilization was based in coastal cities supported by fishing. Instead, Andean society seems to have been built primarily on cotton farming and trade, supported by fishing villages.
"There wasn't anything like this in the world as far as I can tell," Haas said.
The first city to be discovered, Caral in the Supe River Valley, about 120 miles north of Lima, lay virtually ignored for more than 100 years after its discovery, despite its nearly 100-foot-tall pyramids. It had no golden or jeweled artifacts, no pottery shards with which to date it, and no art or writing to indicate its origins.
It was not until Haas' team first reported radiocarbon dates for the site three years ago that scientists appreciated its antiquity. Those dates indicated that Caral was built about 2600 B.C., much earlier than thought possible.
A new series of dates from the Supe River Valley, as well as the nearby Pativilca and Fortaleza valleys, show construction began even earlier, about 3000 B.C.
The driving force may well have been the Humboldt Current, a broad band of cold water rich in marine life, which served as a valuable food source.
But the climate turned much drier beginning about 3100 B.C., eliminating naturally growing fruits and vegetables that villagers relied on to supplement their diet of fish. They began looking inland for new food sources, Haas said.
"They figured out that if you take water out of the rivers and put it on desert land, the desert blooms and becomes very productive," he said. In the Norte Chico region, they could do so by hand-digging short canals.
They grew guava, beans, peppers and fruits — but not the corn or potatoes that researchers previously believed necessary to support a large population. But their most important crop was cotton, which was traded to coastal villagers to make fishing nets.
Andeans were peaceful. "They didn't fight with each other, and nobody else was big enough to fight with them," Haas said.
But beginning about 1800 B.C., possibly because the soil began to lose its productivity, new buildings and monuments got smaller and the big cities began to decline. New, larger cities appeared north and south of Norte Chico.
Warfare eventually began, and Norte Chico was conquered and abandoned.
The only occupants today are scattered farmers.
I resent statements like this!
My ancestors, while hunter-gatherers, were not simple! They had needs, and feelings.
Why, my own male forbears had vague unexpressed longings for wheels...
They don't know when the first pyramid was built in Egypt, though.
That regional flooding of the Black Sea was many thousands of miles from Peru.
453 of these Andeans have been found to have voted for Kerry and Daschle last November...
OK. I don't really know much about ancient China, so I'll have to take your word on that.
Haas likes the spotlight. Don't know enough about this particular study to say one way or the other though.
If you're curious about that question, run, don't walk to your local bookstore or library and get "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. Amazing book.
He ended up writing the book after he visited New Guinea and made some friends among the tribesmen there, who struck him as very intelligent people, despite having a very primitive society, and one of them asked basically the same question you asked.
On the other hand, along with a lot of other overwhelming evidence, it might cause you to consider the possibility that at no time in human history has there been a worldwide flood.
That book has been on my Amazon "Wish List" for far too long. Now with that glowing recommendation I'm gonna have to get it.
I've mentioned it on another thread and it was attacked by a few people; not really sure why, It certainly doesn't seem to have a leftist perspective or ideology at all to me.
Basically, Diamond he attacks the idea that certain cultures developed more slowly because the people of that culture were genetically inferior or stupid or something; he attributes the main reasons for development of societies to the local plant and animal life and geography of given areas.
What if the continents were still slowing from The Event?
Peoples were still close across narrow seas....
Then again, you might consider that it was after the Tower of Babel incedent, perhaps a couple hundred years after the flood, when God created the different languages and scattered the people around the world.
An interesting theory... We could ask Jesus when He comes back.
Geography. You don't invent the wheel in the mountains. And you can't run away (very far) in the mountains.
Also you need widescale agriculture to support a large population and you can't plow a field without a plow, an ox, and fertile soil. Which means metal forging, large animal domestication, and bottomland. There are no large oxen-type mammals or horses in South America and the bottom land is mostly jungle/rain forest with low nutrient counts (except in the NW), etc.
Yup. I did see that...some of it twice.
Merry Christmas
My suspicion is, he doesn't either.
FGS
Disagree. Manpower works just fine.
FGS
I just finished reading this book - I really enjoyed it. It would be very interesting if his theories could be extrapolated from the present. I'd imagine (in fact he seems to imply) that China enjoys the greatest confluence of these factors among individual nations and therefore would rise to pre-eminence in the long term.
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