By Missy Ryan
Lima, Peru - The remains of a city thought to be the oldest in the Americas, buried under Peruvian soil since the era of Egypt's pyramids, could be destroyed by erosion and exposure to the elements if the world community does not rush to the rescue, archeologists said on Wednesday.
Researchers believe that Caral, a complex of stone temples, altars and dwellings located in a desert valley 185km north of Lima, dates to before 2600 BC - around the same time the famed Giza pyramids were built in Egypt.
"Nowhere in Peru or in the Americas - in the Mexican hills or in Mayan lowlands - is there a city this old. Peru predates (other sites) by 1 500 years," archeologist Ruth Shady, who has headed Caral's excavation since 1994, told reporters.
Caral, whose importance was brought to the world's attention last year in research appearing in the journal Science, was recently named one of the world's 100 most-endangered cultural heritage sites for 2002 by the nonprofit New York-based World Monuments Fund.
But now, even as archeologists uncover the city's foremost areas, including an amphitheater 30 metres in diameter, Shady said the site was in danger of swift deterioration due to erosion and exposure to the elements.
Shady said that there already were signs that structures that have withstood centuries could collapse without buttressing, while paint that has adorned buried buildings was flaking off due to daily temperature fluctuations.
"Thousands of years have passed, and some walls are giving in," she said.
According to the World Monuments Fund, the site faces the added risks of agricultural encroachment, looting, governmental failure to implement protection measures and insufficient funds for proper conservation.
While the cash-strapped government of Peru has committed some 1,8 million soles (about R6-million) for the project, Shady said international donations were needed desperately, adding that the World Monuments Fund already was seeking funds.
"This belongs not only to all Peruvians but to all of humanity so the international community needs to contribute to its conservation," she said.
Shady says the "sacred city," which sprawls 65 hectares across the inland valley floor, shattered earlier ideas about when civilisation first flourished in the New World.
"This changes the idea that civilisation was slow in arriving in the New World... and shows civilisation appeared around the same time (in the Old World and the New World)," she told reporters.
In its heyday, which Shady said lasted about a thousand years, Caral was home to about 3 000 people. They lived in a complex society marked by class divisions - with the elite housed in sprawling buildings and servants housed in more spartan settlements nearby - as well as specific religious areas.
The city dominated scores of nearby settlements, she added, and Caral residents traded goods with the Pacific coast to the west and the Andean and jungle regions to the east.
Among the site's most precious finds are 32 flutes made of condor and pelican bones, delicately engraved with images of monkeys, birds, and human faces.
Shady said Peru's biggest telecommunications firm Telefonica del Peru SA, a unit of Spain's Telefonica SA, had pledged to finance the restoration and preservation of one major pyramid-like structure at Caral.
Shady said she hoped tourists would visit the site. Tourism represents a lucrative economic contributor for the culturally vibrant but impoverished nation.
Peruvian sites such as the famed Inca citadel Machu Picchu in the Andean highlands, and the Nasca lines, mysterious giant etchings in the southern desert, draw thousands of tourists each year. - Reuters
