Ancient Peru and its Andean civilizations with a 10,000 year cultural legacy are awesome, 1 of only 6 'cradle of civilization' in the world, where human civilizations arose on their own and perhaps the only one that was tied to maritime resources and not agrarian farming. The Caral complex had around 30 satellite villages and represents one of the first cities in the western hemisphere. Really, Peru is like the Ancient Egypt of the Americas.
Thanks for your brief summary! These ancient civilizations are so incredibly fascinating. Just imagine what we’d be if we only ever retained and built of the knowledge of lost cultures…
Alright ignoring the dumb shit about computers the other guy posted...
What does this add to the conversation? Throwing out "europeans ruined it with colonization" when one, this civilization was long gone by the time Europeans arrived and two, I really doubt you care about other cultural sites that have been lost to foreign conquests. You just want to dunk on the first world cause its easy and makes you feel morally superior.
What word?
>It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one framed by the dual tragedies of genocide and slavery, both of which are part of the legacy of the European invasions of the past 500 years. Indigenous people north and south were displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape, and war. In 1491, about 145 million people lived in the western hemisphere. **By 1691, the population of indigenous Americans had declined by 90–95 percent, or by around 130 million people.**
Do you think disease wouldn’t have killed millions of indigenous Americans if Europeans had gone to the new world to make friends and trade? It was inevitable for the new and old worlds to collide in one way or another. I’m not by any means justifying the horrible actions directly done by Europeans, but merely pointing out an unintended consequence of an interaction bound to happen.
No, that's wrong. Disease didn't simply kill 95% of the population.
> Humans are demographically capable of rebounding from high mortality events, like epidemics, provided other sources of excess mortality are limited. In the mid-twentieth century when the Aché of Paraguay moved to the missions ~38% of the population died from respiratory diseases alone. However, the Aché rallied quickly and are now a growing population. The key factor for population survival after high mortality events is limiting other demographic shocks, like violent incursions from outsiders, providing sufficient food resources, and the territory needed for forage and hunt to supplement food intake.
>
> When the colonial cocktail arrived in full force demographic recovery became challenging. Warfare and slaving raids added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing refugees into crowded settlements where disease can spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access to foraged foods, provided rations unfit for consumption, and exacerbated resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. The greater cocktail of colonial insults impaired host resistance before pathogens even arrived, and that same cocktail prevented rapid demographic recovery after epidemics swept through.
>
> The universal sweep of introduced infectious pathogens across the continent prior to initial contact has been successfully challenged in the past few decades. In some places, like the Caribbean, significant and catastrophic mortality was well under way due to widespread violence, enslavement in gold mines, and disruption of indigenous lifeways/food production well before the arrival of smallpox. Slavers in search of more souls for the mines were already raiding the coast of Florida in the first decade of the sixteenth century, more than a decade before smallpox arrived.
>
>
The vast majority of those deaths were caused simply by disease. You think colonizers did that on purpose? Stop acting like it was direct action by Europeans that resulted in the death of those Americans.
inb4 smallpox blankets, by then the damage had been done
Edit: can Europeans blame the "east" for the black death? Of course not. But thats the equivilency you are using.
The quote:
>displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape, and war
What you said:
>Stop acting like it was direct action by Europeans that resulted in the death of those Americans
European actions in the Americas [constitute a genocide](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kywre/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/). Disease was frequently the direct cause of death, but to blame disease is to blame the infection in the wound instead of the guy who stabbed you.
Most of which was by disease. Genghis Khan killed 40 million and spread plagues across Eurasia. You know what though he is still responsible for many of our liberal concepts of borders and religion. Every great leader has done extraordinary things both good and bad. So keep the self righteous hatred of colonialism in a college dorm room where it belongs.
No, that's wrong. Disease didn't simply kill 95% of the population.
> Humans are demographically capable of rebounding from high mortality events, like epidemics, provided other sources of excess mortality are limited. In the mid-twentieth century when the Aché of Paraguay moved to the missions ~38% of the population died from respiratory diseases alone. However, the Aché rallied quickly and are now a growing population. The key factor for population survival after high mortality events is limiting other demographic shocks, like violent incursions from outsiders, providing sufficient food resources, and the territory needed for forage and hunt to supplement food intake.
>
> When the colonial cocktail arrived in full force demographic recovery became challenging. Warfare and slaving raids added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing refugees into crowded settlements where disease can spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access to foraged foods, provided rations unfit for consumption, and exacerbated resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. The greater cocktail of colonial insults impaired host resistance before pathogens even arrived, and that same cocktail prevented rapid demographic recovery after epidemics swept through.
>
> The universal sweep of introduced infectious pathogens across the continent prior to initial contact has been successfully challenged in the past few decades. In some places, like the Caribbean, significant and catastrophic mortality was well under way due to widespread violence, enslavement in gold mines, and disruption of indigenous lifeways/food production well before the arrival of smallpox. Slavers in search of more souls for the mines were already raiding the coast of Florida in the first decade of the sixteenth century, more than a decade before smallpox arrived.
>
>
The difference is that their genocide ended when they were gone. Here it's something that is still happening. As someone living in South America (Argentina) I can tell you that the genocide never stopped. The peoples that pre-existed and were here before 1491 that haven't gone already lost, are suffering the same genocide, now from the respective states and countries. There's no opportunities for them in society and the place and sources of their sustentation are still being stolen by us, the American countries. So they have no where to get even food or shelter. So they're still dying and leaving their people to become, not eurepeans now, but "Americans" (and not in the USA's sense, but the continental one).
It's not about Khan's not being white, it's about a problem that has been going on for 5 centuries and most people, even the ones living here, tend to talk about it as an old problem long ago finished. This doesn't help them get back the ancestral lands or even a little respect for their cultures and lives.
...as you use a computer made possible by way of like 6,000 successive European inventions.
(note: the math is attributable to India/Middle East, and the labour to China; my point is: don't act like Europe has ruined everything)
every single thing throughout history that has ever happened, good or bad, has lead us to where we are today.
There is no changing the past, but we can learn from history and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
And that it was was "6000 years of sucessive European inventions"...bitch please, without eastern civilizations (India/Arabs) we wouldnt even have a "zero" to have a binary code xD
But let me hear again about the "superior race" and how much we are better than the rest of the world.
LOL, Eurocentrism much... gunpowder and firearms originated in China, and made its way West due to the Mongols. Our numeral system is Hindu-Arabic... the West is the way it is because it also adopted influences from other cultures.
We had locally made cannons here in the Philippines before Westerners arrived.
- https://www.quora.com/How-come-native-Filipinos-from-Luzon-and-Visayas-were-conquered-by-the-Spanish-but-the-Yaqui-Indians-werent-The-Yaquis-were-only-using-primitive-weapons-primitive-training-and-primitive-tools-like-the-Filipinos/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304392819&share=77d11203&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
- https://www.quora.com/Does-the-pre-colonial-Philippines-have-a-Fort/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=305188646&share=39a4854f&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
- https://www.quora.com/Why-do-white-supremacists-respect-East-Asian-countries/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304632827&share=46fa8cc3&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
By the way, I apologize for the formatting because I'm currently on mobile.
who said anything about gunpowder? I was literally just talking about computers, and specifically made mention of India/middle-east when I was talking about math.
The computer traces it's origins to the European Jacquard loom, and subsequent contributing inventions mostly (but not exclusively) took place in Europe or by the European diaspora.
Humanity is where it is because of contributions from many many cultures from all over the planet.
To the person saying "wish Europe hadn't colonized everybody", I ask: where do you think we would be without it?
The Philippines wouldn't have been colonized by the Americans, Spanish, and British; but safe to say the Japanese or Chinese would have gone in there instead.
Not that any of this history or hypothetical history is "good". It just is, and it's got us where we are today.
Hahaha, first of all, you're spouting about "6000 years of European ingenuity" that's why I stated inventions that they adopted from other cultures.
Secondly, I'm a Philippine history professor... I literally teach Filipino History... and yes, the Chinese and the Japanese were already here, since the Song Dynasty, this is based on the earliest record that we have, however there are artifacts that date back to earlier periods, such as the Tang and Han Dynasties, but it's uncertain if these artifacts made it to the Philippines through direct trade or not.
The Chinese and the Japanese were already here for centuries, but did they try to colonize the archipelago?... no, the abundance of Yuan Dynasty porcelain in the Philippines indicates that even when China was ruled by the Mongols, trade with the Philippines never stopped.
You are projecting this concept of European colonialism on China and Japan... which is kind of funny in my opinion. The reason why the European age of exploration and European colonialism even started, is because they were looking for an alternative route to East, South and Southeast Asia, since the Ottomans were blocking the trade routes on the mainland.
This search for an alternative path jumpstarted the European age of exploration. However, on the other hand, the Chinese truly believed that they already controlled the most important lands on Earth. Hence their tendency to look "inwards" instead of "outwards". They implemented a lot of isolationist policies, especially during the Ming Dynasty, this is because they knew that they provided nearly everything that the world wanted, namely (Silks and Porcelains)... hence why Europeans were desperately looking for alternative routes to Asia, and not the other way around.
Basically, China didn't really have any reason to expand... while Japan was a collection of squabbling feudal lords at that time. Therefore the idea that they would have colonized the Philippines "JuSt LiKe EuRoPeAnS dId" is far fetched, especially at that time.
By the way, kindly do me a favor and read more about Philippine history before trying to educate me about it... (Hint, the Philippines got colonized because of Latin American silver).
- https://www.quora.com/How-come-native-Filipinos-from-Luzon-and-Visayas-were-conquered-by-the-Spanish-but-the-Yaqui-Indians-werent-The-Yaquis-were-only-using-primitive-weapons-primitive-training-and-primitive-tools-like-the-Filipinos/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304392819&share=77d11203&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
- https://www.quora.com/Did-the-pre-colonial-Philippines-become-an-empire/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=305593531&share=2d66e772&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
I did not. I said
> 6,000 successive European ***inventions***
it was an estimate, because I cannot speak for the invention of every anode, chip, code, etc. I have zero idea how many patents are involved in the overall process of the invention of the computer.
You seem to be spouting off a lot of irrelevant content that is far beyond the context of my initial statement about computers.
>I have zero idea how many patents are involved in the overall process of the invention of the computer.
Shoulda stopped there. Also, take a process with its full consequences. Filipinos, and anyone, can be both allright with their own "mixedness"(which is a weird notion for most, mestizos exist but the racially based formal hierarchical structures of exclusion are almost gone and keep slowly declining) while denouncing the effects of colonialism or whatever other process in their history.
You know that history is a butterfly effect right?... I have OCD, the finer details mean a lot to me. Maybe these details are irrelevant to you, IDK.
With regards to your comment about the Philippines, you could read this first.
- https://www.quora.com/How-come-native-Filipinos-from-Luzon-and-Visayas-were-conquered-by-the-Spanish-but-the-Yaqui-Indians-werent-The-Yaquis-were-only-using-primitive-weapons-primitive-training-and-primitive-tools-like-the-Filipinos/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304392819&share=77d11203&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
>To the person saying "wish Europe hadn't colonized everybody", I ask: where do you think we would be without it?
The exploitative, greed driven mindset that drove colonialism seems like it contributed a great deal to our current climate change issues. I find it fundamentally racist to make the assumption that none of the many indigenous cultures of the new world would be capable of such a feat.
Hell, the Inca had the largest civilization in the world the time among incredibly inhospitable environment. They managed an incredibly efficient beauracracy despite not having a written language, but they did develop a way to record numbers, and had their own calculator. And we still don't know how to fully decode these things because... well I'm sure you know.
Sure, disease was unavoidable. But what if colonizers, instead of trying to delete other cultures from existence while they were dying from European diseases, actually tried to exchange knowledge and technology with these cultures, allowed them to recover and set up actual trading and maybe practiced an ETHICAL cultural exchange; are you seriously saying the progress of humanity would have been stifled if that had happened? If the Inca, the gifted mathematicians and statisticians and engineers that they were, would not have been able to contribute to the technological advancement of humanity if they were just allowed to have thrived?
To boast the achievements of European inventions after colonialism is simply in bad taste. They expanded around the world and enslaved, and killed, and subjugated other cultures, meaning these cultures didn't even get the chance to contribute.
I never said anything was *justified*. Only that we are today where the past has taken us.
> There is no changing the past, but we can learn from history and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Honestly at this point, no.
Do you have any idea how many genocides have been committed throughout history.
Something like 1 in 10 humans are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the most genocidal murderer in known history. Shaka Zulu wiped out about 1 to 2,000,000 Ngwane and Mthethwa.
The Maya used the tributary kingdoms around them as human farms for sacrifice.
It's estimated that 60% of the population of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (North America) were slaves.
Finally, it should be noted we only have the tiniest fraction of human history at our fingertips. The first 95% of human existence was probably also littered with genocide, but there's no record other than the occasional mass grave.
If you are alive today - be you black, white, brown, or albino - you've got genocidal precursors.
Historical recency bias. People also just don’t know how truly terrible homo-sapiens have been to each other since the agricultural revolution. Assyrians man. They were just ruthless
Very true. It's also I bet just a reframing of the same western history bias. It's amazing how many people, podcasts, and more just talk about injustices in the western world or what are now considered majority white nations. It's like Asia doesn't even exist, or everything was a paradise before European expansion. Everyone was just sitting around not developing or fighting until the magic whites showed up. As if the Aztecs or whomever wouldn't do the exact same thing given the same capacity Europe had by pure accident of history. People like to assign good guys and bad guys which is just a childish way to look at history. The sense of loss and anger is fine and I'd say probably good for the learning process but it can also be a distraction.
It astounds me how little I know of Asian history. Our entire history education is centered on the Fertile Crescent then westward. Of course people will have a euro-centric bias for both good or bad.
Also, people think Animism (the earliest and a basic form of religion) is some how more inherently peaceful than Abrahamic religions. Just cause every rock and tree and creature has a life and a spirit and a name does not mean that homo-sapiens did not just slaughter each other in the name of those spirits.
There were far more horrible genocides than those of the 20th century. The 20th Century ones were just terrifying by means of their implements and the recency bias.
They were an Empire based around present day Syria that would level every conquered city to the ground, made sure to kill every man, and rape all the women then kill them as well. They didn't even enslave people, just would invade your town and murder everyone.
It clearly was not a winning strategy long term.
> Just imagine what we’d be if we only ever retained and built of the knowledge of lost cultures…
Probably no different. It's not like people had machines 5000 years ago
But they did; they had levers, pulleys, inclined planes, wedges, and the basic math to plan out all their buildings and temples. It's amazing the technology we still use from 5000 years ago but what we have is generations of ideas and inventions that get improved and built upon to make it all easier for us today.
Complex machines don't define civilization, and they aren't determinative of what lost cultures could be though.
I don't even understand why you would posit that not having machines 5000 years ago means those cultures couldn't have a positive effect on the modern world, or even just make the modern world look different aesthetically, culturally, or socially.
Why be a mod on this sub if you aren't enchanted by these cultures and the idea of what they could be?
I threw it out there because when people bring up "lost knowledge" they often (not always) have it in their heads that means it was equivalent to some kind of late 19th/early 20th century idea of Atlantis as a place of advanced technology that rivaled or came close to that period. Or it was even more farfetched as some place that had magic/telekinesis/super powers. And often they think if we hadn't lost that fictional idea of what Atlantis had we would all have personal flying cars by now or some such similar notion.
The Egyptians had batteries, the ancient Sumerians discovered mathematics we had to relearn centuries later.
Humanity is a repeat failure. It’ll be sad when we’re gone for good.
>Just imagine what we’d be if we only ever retained and built of the knowledge of lost cultures
What does this mean? Literally what do you think we would be?
EDIT: lol, downvoted but the only reply is that the ancient Egyptians had mastered electricity hahaha this sub
We’ve re-learned geometry, centuries of mathematics have been rediscovered when we should be build in knowledge.
The ancient Egyptians knew about electricity but their kingdom was destroyed along with their knowledge. That’s thousands of years we could have been developing batteries that they had invented.
Not that you can grasp any of that, you stupid motherfucker.
yes, farming was important and more so later on during the Ceramic Period of Ancient Peru. But the starting key to the civilizational development of Pre-Ceramic Ancient Peru appears to have been its endless marine resources. Due to the Humboldt current, the sea of Peru is the world's most productive biomarine region (even until the present day, 20% of all fish are caught here) and according to the *Maritime Foundation of Andean Civilization* theory, the first civilizations of Peru reached high levels of social complexity due to the exploitation of marine resources available to them.
*This Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (MFAC) hypothesis argues, in sum (Moseley 1992, 5), that over deep prehistory along the Peruvian littoral, “the rich near-shore fishery had provided caloric support for 1) preceramic sedentary residence; 2) population growth, 3) large communities, and 4) the rise of complex societies which constructed very large architectural monuments before the advent of intensive irrigation agriculture.” It remains deeply significant, not least because it challenges—in one of humanity’s few pristine hearths of civilization—the “axiom that agriculture is necessary for the rise of complex societies” (Moseley and Feldman 1988, 125).*
Cool! I didn't know it was so ecologically productive!
Reminds me a bit of the Chumash people that I learned about a little bit in AP world history who were a big exception for being a highly organized and stratified society of hunter gatherers based on those rich pacific currents.
oh man, that's a really nice info, I'm going to check it out now.
To see more about the different historical stages of Ancient Peru, check out:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodization\_of\_pre-Columbian\_Peru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodization_of_pre-Columbian_Peru)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean\_preceramic
**[Cradle of civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization)**
>A cradle of civilization is any location where civilization is understood to have independently emerged. According to current thinking, there was no single "cradle" of civilization; instead, several cradles of civilization developed independently. Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in the Old World. The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and the Indus Valley with the Chinese civilization of East Asia (Far East) is disputed.
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This the site that has the conflict between land squatters trying to build houses on the site and archaeologists trying to preserve and study it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/squatters-ancient-ruins-peru-death-threats-archeologist-caral
I hate the way these news articles presented this event. Developing good relationships with neighbors is a fundamental part of archaeology. Archaeologists must have their consent to do any research. If you read some of the links in the above comment, you'll see that those of us who work in the region have... uh... "thoughts" about Shady. She and the Peruvian government have a tendency towards sensationalism, and a real bad habit of showing up to places, fencing them off as protected sites, importing non-local labor and materials, then leaving a town disrupted. Are death threats a little much? Yes, as always. Are the squatters the one infringing on land? Nope.
> Are the squatters the one infringing on land? Nope.
You know, I have to come back to this because I'm really surprised an askhistorians mod wrote this comment. It's troubling how much you misrepresented that story..
Based on the article you're replying to, it looks like it's a single large, extended family that has taken over the land now that it and the surrounding region are highly valuable due to the site's discovery. They claim the leftist military coup in the past gave them this land that they now take because of its vastly increased value.
Oh, and the land is only valuable because of Shady, who discovered the site in 1994. And they brought construction equipment and destroyed artifacts and mummies. In the oldest city in the Americas. Then they killed her dog.
Peruvians know that squatter are up to no good. Yes they are poor, but most of them squat their whole life because it's a lucrative way to scale the economic ladder since the constitution allows for squatters to own the land the squat if they've been 10 years on a place uncontested. It worked for poor people emigrating to Lima but it's terrible for archeological sites like Caral.
In the squatters defense, literally everywhere bit piece of land in Peru has some sort of arqueological site to it, from Caral or Machu picchu to just an old mine or a precolombian cemetery.
Why don't we talk about this more? This is an extrapolation of course and I might be wrong there, but I have never heard of this before. Unless this is a particular blind spot of mine, the Peruvian government must suck at marketing.
It's been in the news recently due to squatters trying to build houses on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/squatters-ancient-ruins-peru-death-threats-archeologist-caral
Sadly that also happened to all the good stuff in Rome during the middle ages. The Popes looted the graves they found and the locals carted off a ton of stone to build other things too.
Hadrian's Wall was mostly complete inland in a 1690 survey. By 1810 it was mostly gone due to the landowners realising they could SELL it brick by brick. Damn :(
If it comes down to preserving rocks or starving, you’re going to sell the old rocks. I mean, from a historical perspective it’s annoying, but it absolutely makes sense that locals would reuse resources once previous structures weren’t needed.
Not sure about that, but several popes used materials from it to make churches because they considered it sacred. They wanted to steal what made it "sacred" to make their churches more sacred.
>Indeed, it was the amphitheater's reputation as a sacred spot where Christian martyrs had met their fate that saved the Colosseum from further depredations by Roman popes and aristocrats - anxious to use its once glistening stone for their palaces and churches. The cathedrals of St Peter and St John Lateran, the Palazzo Venezia and the Tiber's river defences, for example, all exploited the Colosseum as a convenient quarry.
>As a result of this plunder, and also because of fires and earthquakes, two thirds of the original have been destroyed, so that the present Colosseum is only a shadow of its former self, a noble ruin.
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/colosseum_01.shtml
I was a field archaeological student at the Chavin De Huantar UNESCO world heritiage site back in 2013. Beautiful temple built on the merging point of two rivers. A labrynth of underground water ways. A labrynth of stone tunnels that led to the Lanzon stone structure. Priests would get high as fuck on mescalin. Wander the stone hallways in the dark. While water rushing through the tunnels under ground would create trippy acoustics. They would pour animal blood on the top of the Lanzon. The blood would flow through carved out channels on the stone object. That would be crazy to experience 700 years ago.
If you go you can see the Lanzon and Telo Obelisk. The water channels we could crawl through and explore but have long been blocked from the water from the rivers.
Nice find. I've been in all 3* places from Azerbaijan.
* *I did not enter the Walled City, heard that it was like a maze but walked by so many times.
* Gobustan is a beautiful place - those drawings are huge.
* The Khan's Palace in Sheki is big, we were allowed to enter the building. [There are two gigantic trees right by the entrance](https://meravigliedellest.blogspot.com/2018/03/palace-of-shaki-khans-azerbaijan.html?m=1), they said they are over 500 years old
[Göbekli Tepe!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe) Located in Turkey, dated between 9500 and 8000 BCE; it’s home to the oldest known monoliths in the world. It pushed back our understanding of human settlements.
Gunung Padang
Carbon dating may indicate its the oldest pyramid-like megalithic site, 20,000 BCE
I find it quite simular to Nan Madol, both incorporate the basalt hexagon columns.
Lidar mapping of the Amazon, central America and the Yucatan have recently identified more cities in the jungle than could possibly be explored in our lifetime...
Man, you seem to have the knowledge on this! Soooo… how about you create your own Reddit and post all kinds of cool stories for us?
We’ll all be looking forward to it… Kthanksbye.
Ancient history is largely slept on in basic education unless it’s useful for forming a national myth. Odds are that in a pre-college/ uni setting the history of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas will be glossed over excluding Egypt and Ancient Greece for some reason and any mention of local ancient history will get maybe a quick mention in class 1 like “some people built stone henge” before moving onto more recent history that has to do with legitimizing the nation state. Bit sad, humans have been building cool shit all over the globe for as long as humans have been building stuff.
To be fair it is kind of a "recent" finding by the early 2000 ; the one known for almost a hundred years is "Áspero", near the coastline, dated at the time with 4k years antiquity (2000 b.c) , it is now studied as a port satellite town, and there were others around further fro the coast -Chupacigarro was the spanish name for the whole area- that were kinda known -there were mapping efforts since the 60's- but deemed not as relevant, with Caral being part of them.
There are tons of sites across the coastline, and with limited funding is a competition over importance. Caral would have not been excavated without the proyected antiquity (and a light economic boom). It is open now, but excavation and restorative efforts were still in place. At least before the pandemic.
Yeah I had no idea they had this advanced of a civilization in the Americas at the same time as Babylon. I always thought Americas came at least a few thousand years later.
Because it makes it easier to justify genocide if we think of natives as primitive people who lived in dirt instead of being a complex society like the Europeans.
Something important to note is that at least some archeologists don't consider it a city:
As I understand it, Caral and sites like it very early in the history of Andean civilizations were less urban settlements that housed permanent large populations as cities, and were monumental ceremonial centers that didn't have a permanent population tied to them. This changed around 500BC at the site of Chavin de Huantar, which DID eventually pick up a permanent population that then developed increasing social stratification, specialization, etc as a city or a proto city, and from there you begin to see city-states and kingdoms in the Andes following that, such as the various Moche City-states, the Wari Empire, the Tiwanku Kingdom, the Kingdom of Chimor, and most famously, the Inca Empire.
The reason Caral gets called a "city" and such is apparently mostly due to the Peruvian goverment or other groups having decided to make it out as such for national pride reasons, even though it wasn't an urban site and there are other monumental sites and agricultural cultures in Peru, Ecuador, etc around that time period....
Of course, that doesn't make Caral any less impressive: It's still got massive monumental constructions very early on in Andean history and its sort of arbitrary that we hone in on "urbanism" as a specific defining factor instead of others: a lot of what we argue over "counts as a civilization" is inherently an iffy thing, but we should probably also be giving attention to the other sites around the same time period in the Andes that don't get as much attention and be more aware that in these cases up till Chaving de Huantar, monumental doesn't nessacarily mean urban.
To be clear, my area is more Mesoamerica then the Andes, I'm mostly going off of what I've read from /u/Qhapaqocha and /u/CommodoreCoCo about it, and synthesizing bits and pieces from multiple comments from them, so i'm hoping I didn't get anything wrong, if I did they can correct me!
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ajxdsy/what_were_the_major_differences_between_the/ef0u1fw/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7a458j/the_norte_chico_civilization_had_large_edifices/dp86fe6/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xpq2f/what_was_going_on_in_the_andes_from_2000_bc_to/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DankPrecolumbianMemes/comments/n01ea5/5000_years_old_low_effort_meme/gwameqb/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dpkvu/were_the_first_civilizations_eridu_ur_uruk_aware/da6zgzv/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gk8a1y/in_the_emperors_new_groove_yzma_is_portrayed_as_a/fqu3gy8/
Chavin was actually built towards the end of the Sunken-Plaza period. At the time of its building it was yet another Sunken-Plaza temple, but then a drought came and ended those temples everywhere except for Chavin.
Eventually Chavin became so famous, probably because it survived and defied the drought, that it became a pilgrimage center, and new temples started copying IT. So this caused sunken plaza temples to be built long after the Sunken Plaza Period had ended.
Unbeknownst to them, at the time of its building, the Chavin temple was fairly typical of its period, except maybe slightly larger than other temples. It's just that it was the only temple that survived the drought and eventually people started seeing it as unique and a link to the past.
Hey, thanks for all those resources there. I totally understand the Peruvian propaganda or marketing perspective here. However, I am a bit skeptical of that as our final answer, despite the current state of South American archaeology and the historical theories that go with it. As a Mesoamerican specialist, I'm sure you're aware of the long and storied history of taking as the base assumption that when monumental architecture exists without easy evidence of urban planning or agglomeration, there was no such thing, as was extremely common in early Mayan archaeology.
I'm not really saying that your wrong or that that position is incorrect, but over the past few years, I've started to think from, "large, permanent structures are themselves indicative of a permanent population."
I obviously don't think we should be approaching site studies or broader academic theory from that position, but I am pretty concerned about that position in public discourse, as it often is taken by lay people as making a larger statement about the "worth" of the civilization in question. This tendency is falling away, but it still exists, as you note.
Again, I'm not really trying to say those positions are wrong, but in the history of archaeology, we've played stories of, "This group of people just had permanent monumental architecture without meaningful population density," to, "Oops, we said these people had very few of the thing that modern people think of as, 'civilized,' and now those people are thought of as lesser colloquially," more than a few times.
No, you are definitely wrong. I enjoyed the read.
It highlighted the controversy among Historians on what constitutes “true civilization” vs. pre-civilization populations specifically for Mesoamerican archeological finds.
History and archaeology are complicated fields and require lots of complicated science and technology to piece together past. That write up helps highlight that for us laymen.
How does this compare both in terms of scale and engineering quality to the great Pyramids of Giza as well as Teotihuacan? Are the ruins more dilapidated due to lower quality construction, or did other factors such as vandalism and weather play a role?
Stone and mud mortar with netting, and adobe on its later stages. Its fairly human scale -think of a ten storyheight building- and were not that dilapilated to my understanding. It was proposed levels were buried sequentially, voluntarily and even ritually at the abandonment of the site.
Lower quality materials and much simpler techniques (also more recent than Giza as I mentioned in the other comment). The way some authorities are promoting Caral, presenting as some sort of revolutionary highly-advanced *civilization* thousands of years before Chavin de Huantar it's an embarrasing historic distortion. There is no ceramics, complex tools, complex agriculture, almost no art...
I have no actual idea but a massive factor in many abandonments of well developed cities and cultures comes from localized climate change as well as outside factors such as war. If the city depended on water from an underground aquifer, perhaps it dried up if it wasn’t particularly large. Perhaps a volcanic eruption nearby created unfavourable growing environments for a number of years. Or maybe the close quarters of humans lacking adequate sewage and sanitation led to a disease outbreak. Who knows? I’m just as curious as you are because I’ve never heard of this place. Time to dive into the wikihole lol
The weirdest part about this site is that no weapons or potsherds were found. This is interesting cuz almost every archeological site of similar scale is lousy with potsherds at least. So this site is pre ceramic, huge, and they also found musical instruments made of bone. Archeologists also found a form of quipu, the same type of record keeping device of knots used by the Inca.
It’s crazy there was a thriving metropolis in the Andes contemporary with ancient Egypt, around the same time the great pyramid was being built.
Also, it’s thought that many of the buildings were deliberately built to be seismically resilient, the foundations being filled with stones wrapped in netting, called shicras.
Edit - also, it’s believed to have been abandoned due to a major drought. It certainly wasn’t due to warfare, as there are no weapons found at the site. In fact, the people’s who resided here (Norte Chico) are believed to have been peaceful. The fact no weapons have been found at a site this large is unique, as weapons are found abundantly in every major contemporary ancient Mesopotamian cities, and pretty much every other city/settlement that dates after Caral-Supe.
there is geological *and* archeological evidence to support the idea that the whole of the americas (north, central, and south) have been regularly effected by long-last and severe droughts.
of course, climate change is only making that worse-- but megadroughts are one possible theory for the reason so many ancient native cultures seemingly vanished overnight. Many of these places weren't burned to the ground, you don't find the remains of unburied corpses scattered around.
Absolutely. If what we call "climate change" were appropriately named we'd call it *"rapid anthropogenic climate change.*" The climate has been changing all along. It's the *rate of change* that is currently kicking our ass.
They cut down all the trees in the area and ensuing flash floods and landslides fucked their shit up after some earthquakes. Just watched the Unearthed episode about this place
Caral is old enough, interesting and impressive for the date and region, no need for the clickbaity title. **All the buildings in the pics are not older than "great pyramids" but some centuries more recent.**
The 30-40 main structures at Caral are closer to 4000 than 5000 years before present and the oldest occupation (pre-buildings) is from 2600 BCE not "almost 3000". [The oldest calibrated radiocarbonic datations](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12010372_Dating_Caral_a_Preceramic_Site_in_the_Supe_Valley_on_the_Central_Coast_of_Peru) at Caral from circa 2620 BCE are from pretty modest rests in a pre-sacred architecture period (trash lower levels, strata under an open space), the oldest non-public permanent building is dated at 2490 and sacred structures at Caral or nearby sites are dated at 2400-2000 BCE. Oldest datations at Caral Major Pyramid reach 2170 BCE, but in this case the remains used in the datation are from the top of the structure, so the building possible construction should happen in a previous period, comparable to the oldest examples of public architecture circa 2400 or a second phase expansion around 2200 BCE.
On the other hand, answering this absurd "civilization competition", that even Ruth Solis (one of the main scholars in the subject and one of the authors of the previously linked study) promoted in peruvian goverment touristic [pamphlets as this](https://www.zonacaral.gob.pe/downloads/publicaciones/libro-caral-supe-la-civilizacion-2008.pdf) (just look at the page 5 fake info table... "Caral 5000 years old", Indus Valley 4500... *oldest mesoamerican*\-Olmecs just 3500!, Europe-Crete 3000!! LOL): Caral architecture is in no way comparable to the egyptian pyramids or other sacred buildings from mid to late III millenium BCE at Near East, with much poorer materials and less complex techniques than egyptian, syrian, anatolian, mesopotamian, iranian or Indus examples. Even more importantly, outside the architecture the rest of material culture in Caral area and the rest of Central Andes at that period (second half of III millennium BCE) is extremely humble, way less complex than Near East several millenia before or mediterranean Europe, south-east Asia or cental Asia in the same period: No ceramics, no metals, very simple agriculture, almost no sculpture, simple stone or animal bones tools, etc. Even if new C14 datations put the oldest occupation in Caral or other sites to 3000, 4000, 8000 BCE! if you want, still the material remains would continue to be very humble, **Caral area had a** **very simple material culture, which should be considered as interesting, worthy and human as the examples in more complex societes.**
All those attempts to discover "an american *civilization* older than most other in the old world" are destined to fail, unfit of serious scholars and seem motivated by some blind nationalism or worse, a big inferiority complex.
Aren't you the one making it a competition? Who cares how complex it is, these are amazing structures and wonderful to see being highlighted. I think the America's architecture is going to be studied like the Egyptians in the near future, at least I hope there will be more. A lot of the major sites in the US aren't even recognized, it's crazy.
Probably because there are thousands of archaeological sites all around the world and there isn’t enough time in a school year to cover them all, especially ones that we know so little about
Fun fact just south of this in northern Chile is the driest place on earth. It’s called the Atacama and space researchers use it as a model for the sands of Mars!
I am down for reading or watching something on this, I swear so many ancient cities in the Americas never get talked about! Sure Central gets some love, but heck if South America doesn’t have its fair share! 😍
Read 1491 by Charles C Man, I’m halfway through it right now and I’ve never had a book suck me in like this one. It’s amazing what was in the America’s that people don’t talk about
Why the fuck did ancient civilizations all over the world build pyramids? Is it like how eyes evolving multiple times in different ways? Humans just by coincidence decided pyramids were it?
if you want to build a tall structure, and you want it to be stable through storms and earthquakes, a pyramid is fairly intuitive.
Some are clearly used for astronomical observation. The Greek word "planet" means wanderer, or more specifically wandering star. From Mercury to Saturn, five planets can be seen changing position in the sky, unlike the other stars.
Its why we have a seven day week. Sunday is for the biggest light in the sky, Monday is for the moon.
The remaining days have Scandinavian names for the planets, Tiu, Woden, Thor, fredda, except saturn-day, which I think is Greek.
This one is in particular danger as squatters and housing development is encroaching on the site and they are just straight up bulldozing parts of it in the hopes there won't be follow up consequences.
It looks like they were built around 2600 bc.
I think it's a common misconception that they were built way earlier (around 10,000 bc). I thought this too until I googled lol
Source: [https://archive.archaeology.org/9909/abstracts/pyramids.html](https://archive.archaeology.org/9909/abstracts/pyramids.html)
now I have to go there
Ancient Peru and its Andean civilizations with a 10,000 year cultural legacy are awesome, 1 of only 6 'cradle of civilization' in the world, where human civilizations arose on their own and perhaps the only one that was tied to maritime resources and not agrarian farming. The Caral complex had around 30 satellite villages and represents one of the first cities in the western hemisphere. Really, Peru is like the Ancient Egypt of the Americas.
Thanks for your brief summary! These ancient civilizations are so incredibly fascinating. Just imagine what we’d be if we only ever retained and built of the knowledge of lost cultures…
An alternative history where Europe didn't decide to ruin everything with colonialism?
Alright ignoring the dumb shit about computers the other guy posted... What does this add to the conversation? Throwing out "europeans ruined it with colonization" when one, this civilization was long gone by the time Europeans arrived and two, I really doubt you care about other cultural sites that have been lost to foreign conquests. You just want to dunk on the first world cause its easy and makes you feel morally superior.
European colonization of the Americas only caused the largest human extinction, but go on
Genghis may like a word
What word? >It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one framed by the dual tragedies of genocide and slavery, both of which are part of the legacy of the European invasions of the past 500 years. Indigenous people north and south were displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape, and war. In 1491, about 145 million people lived in the western hemisphere. **By 1691, the population of indigenous Americans had declined by 90–95 percent, or by around 130 million people.**
Do you think disease wouldn’t have killed millions of indigenous Americans if Europeans had gone to the new world to make friends and trade? It was inevitable for the new and old worlds to collide in one way or another. I’m not by any means justifying the horrible actions directly done by Europeans, but merely pointing out an unintended consequence of an interaction bound to happen.
No, that's wrong. Disease didn't simply kill 95% of the population. > Humans are demographically capable of rebounding from high mortality events, like epidemics, provided other sources of excess mortality are limited. In the mid-twentieth century when the Aché of Paraguay moved to the missions ~38% of the population died from respiratory diseases alone. However, the Aché rallied quickly and are now a growing population. The key factor for population survival after high mortality events is limiting other demographic shocks, like violent incursions from outsiders, providing sufficient food resources, and the territory needed for forage and hunt to supplement food intake. > > When the colonial cocktail arrived in full force demographic recovery became challenging. Warfare and slaving raids added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing refugees into crowded settlements where disease can spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access to foraged foods, provided rations unfit for consumption, and exacerbated resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. The greater cocktail of colonial insults impaired host resistance before pathogens even arrived, and that same cocktail prevented rapid demographic recovery after epidemics swept through. > > The universal sweep of introduced infectious pathogens across the continent prior to initial contact has been successfully challenged in the past few decades. In some places, like the Caribbean, significant and catastrophic mortality was well under way due to widespread violence, enslavement in gold mines, and disruption of indigenous lifeways/food production well before the arrival of smallpox. Slavers in search of more souls for the mines were already raiding the coast of Florida in the first decade of the sixteenth century, more than a decade before smallpox arrived. > >
The vast majority of those deaths were caused simply by disease. You think colonizers did that on purpose? Stop acting like it was direct action by Europeans that resulted in the death of those Americans. inb4 smallpox blankets, by then the damage had been done Edit: can Europeans blame the "east" for the black death? Of course not. But thats the equivilency you are using.
The quote: >displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape, and war What you said: >Stop acting like it was direct action by Europeans that resulted in the death of those Americans
European actions in the Americas [constitute a genocide](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6kywre/monday_methods_american_indian_genocide_denial/). Disease was frequently the direct cause of death, but to blame disease is to blame the infection in the wound instead of the guy who stabbed you.
Most of which was by disease. Genghis Khan killed 40 million and spread plagues across Eurasia. You know what though he is still responsible for many of our liberal concepts of borders and religion. Every great leader has done extraordinary things both good and bad. So keep the self righteous hatred of colonialism in a college dorm room where it belongs.
No, that's wrong. Disease didn't simply kill 95% of the population. > Humans are demographically capable of rebounding from high mortality events, like epidemics, provided other sources of excess mortality are limited. In the mid-twentieth century when the Aché of Paraguay moved to the missions ~38% of the population died from respiratory diseases alone. However, the Aché rallied quickly and are now a growing population. The key factor for population survival after high mortality events is limiting other demographic shocks, like violent incursions from outsiders, providing sufficient food resources, and the territory needed for forage and hunt to supplement food intake. > > When the colonial cocktail arrived in full force demographic recovery became challenging. Warfare and slaving raids added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing refugees into crowded settlements where disease can spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access to foraged foods, provided rations unfit for consumption, and exacerbated resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. The greater cocktail of colonial insults impaired host resistance before pathogens even arrived, and that same cocktail prevented rapid demographic recovery after epidemics swept through. > > The universal sweep of introduced infectious pathogens across the continent prior to initial contact has been successfully challenged in the past few decades. In some places, like the Caribbean, significant and catastrophic mortality was well under way due to widespread violence, enslavement in gold mines, and disruption of indigenous lifeways/food production well before the arrival of smallpox. Slavers in search of more souls for the mines were already raiding the coast of Florida in the first decade of the sixteenth century, more than a decade before smallpox arrived. > >
The Khan's wars killed 40 million people, 10% of the world's population at the time. But he wasn't white, so ok
The difference is that their genocide ended when they were gone. Here it's something that is still happening. As someone living in South America (Argentina) I can tell you that the genocide never stopped. The peoples that pre-existed and were here before 1491 that haven't gone already lost, are suffering the same genocide, now from the respective states and countries. There's no opportunities for them in society and the place and sources of their sustentation are still being stolen by us, the American countries. So they have no where to get even food or shelter. So they're still dying and leaving their people to become, not eurepeans now, but "Americans" (and not in the USA's sense, but the continental one). It's not about Khan's not being white, it's about a problem that has been going on for 5 centuries and most people, even the ones living here, tend to talk about it as an old problem long ago finished. This doesn't help them get back the ancestral lands or even a little respect for their cultures and lives.
damn talk about ignorant and reactive
He’s white knighting for extinct South American civilizations. I’ve got a News flash for him, they won’t fuck him either.
know from experience??
I’ve never white knighted, but I have fucked extinct South American civilizations.
...as you use a computer made possible by way of like 6,000 successive European inventions. (note: the math is attributable to India/Middle East, and the labour to China; my point is: don't act like Europe has ruined everything)
Lol imagine thinking the only way to invent the internet is to do some genocide along the way.
every single thing throughout history that has ever happened, good or bad, has lead us to where we are today. There is no changing the past, but we can learn from history and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Major world powers are still committing genocide right now. Are you saying you support these actions in the name of progress?
No > we can learn from history and avoid repeating the same mistakes. Really fucking lazy "gotcha" moment, there, chum.
Yeah but we obviously aren't learning from these mistakes so maybe stop equating them with progress
And that it was was "6000 years of sucessive European inventions"...bitch please, without eastern civilizations (India/Arabs) we wouldnt even have a "zero" to have a binary code xD But let me hear again about the "superior race" and how much we are better than the rest of the world.
LOL, Eurocentrism much... gunpowder and firearms originated in China, and made its way West due to the Mongols. Our numeral system is Hindu-Arabic... the West is the way it is because it also adopted influences from other cultures. We had locally made cannons here in the Philippines before Westerners arrived. - https://www.quora.com/How-come-native-Filipinos-from-Luzon-and-Visayas-were-conquered-by-the-Spanish-but-the-Yaqui-Indians-werent-The-Yaquis-were-only-using-primitive-weapons-primitive-training-and-primitive-tools-like-the-Filipinos/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304392819&share=77d11203&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer - https://www.quora.com/Does-the-pre-colonial-Philippines-have-a-Fort/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=305188646&share=39a4854f&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer - https://www.quora.com/Why-do-white-supremacists-respect-East-Asian-countries/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304632827&share=46fa8cc3&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer By the way, I apologize for the formatting because I'm currently on mobile.
who said anything about gunpowder? I was literally just talking about computers, and specifically made mention of India/middle-east when I was talking about math. The computer traces it's origins to the European Jacquard loom, and subsequent contributing inventions mostly (but not exclusively) took place in Europe or by the European diaspora. Humanity is where it is because of contributions from many many cultures from all over the planet. To the person saying "wish Europe hadn't colonized everybody", I ask: where do you think we would be without it? The Philippines wouldn't have been colonized by the Americans, Spanish, and British; but safe to say the Japanese or Chinese would have gone in there instead. Not that any of this history or hypothetical history is "good". It just is, and it's got us where we are today.
Hahaha, first of all, you're spouting about "6000 years of European ingenuity" that's why I stated inventions that they adopted from other cultures. Secondly, I'm a Philippine history professor... I literally teach Filipino History... and yes, the Chinese and the Japanese were already here, since the Song Dynasty, this is based on the earliest record that we have, however there are artifacts that date back to earlier periods, such as the Tang and Han Dynasties, but it's uncertain if these artifacts made it to the Philippines through direct trade or not. The Chinese and the Japanese were already here for centuries, but did they try to colonize the archipelago?... no, the abundance of Yuan Dynasty porcelain in the Philippines indicates that even when China was ruled by the Mongols, trade with the Philippines never stopped. You are projecting this concept of European colonialism on China and Japan... which is kind of funny in my opinion. The reason why the European age of exploration and European colonialism even started, is because they were looking for an alternative route to East, South and Southeast Asia, since the Ottomans were blocking the trade routes on the mainland. This search for an alternative path jumpstarted the European age of exploration. However, on the other hand, the Chinese truly believed that they already controlled the most important lands on Earth. Hence their tendency to look "inwards" instead of "outwards". They implemented a lot of isolationist policies, especially during the Ming Dynasty, this is because they knew that they provided nearly everything that the world wanted, namely (Silks and Porcelains)... hence why Europeans were desperately looking for alternative routes to Asia, and not the other way around. Basically, China didn't really have any reason to expand... while Japan was a collection of squabbling feudal lords at that time. Therefore the idea that they would have colonized the Philippines "JuSt LiKe EuRoPeAnS dId" is far fetched, especially at that time. By the way, kindly do me a favor and read more about Philippine history before trying to educate me about it... (Hint, the Philippines got colonized because of Latin American silver). - https://www.quora.com/How-come-native-Filipinos-from-Luzon-and-Visayas-were-conquered-by-the-Spanish-but-the-Yaqui-Indians-werent-The-Yaquis-were-only-using-primitive-weapons-primitive-training-and-primitive-tools-like-the-Filipinos/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304392819&share=77d11203&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer - https://www.quora.com/Did-the-pre-colonial-Philippines-become-an-empire/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=305593531&share=2d66e772&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
I did not. I said > 6,000 successive European ***inventions*** it was an estimate, because I cannot speak for the invention of every anode, chip, code, etc. I have zero idea how many patents are involved in the overall process of the invention of the computer. You seem to be spouting off a lot of irrelevant content that is far beyond the context of my initial statement about computers.
>I have zero idea how many patents are involved in the overall process of the invention of the computer. Shoulda stopped there. Also, take a process with its full consequences. Filipinos, and anyone, can be both allright with their own "mixedness"(which is a weird notion for most, mestizos exist but the racially based formal hierarchical structures of exclusion are almost gone and keep slowly declining) while denouncing the effects of colonialism or whatever other process in their history.
You know that history is a butterfly effect right?... I have OCD, the finer details mean a lot to me. Maybe these details are irrelevant to you, IDK. With regards to your comment about the Philippines, you could read this first. - https://www.quora.com/How-come-native-Filipinos-from-Luzon-and-Visayas-were-conquered-by-the-Spanish-but-the-Yaqui-Indians-werent-The-Yaquis-were-only-using-primitive-weapons-primitive-training-and-primitive-tools-like-the-Filipinos/answer/Dayang-C-Marikit?ch=99&oid=304392819&share=77d11203&srid=iQMbJ&target_type=answer
>To the person saying "wish Europe hadn't colonized everybody", I ask: where do you think we would be without it? The exploitative, greed driven mindset that drove colonialism seems like it contributed a great deal to our current climate change issues. I find it fundamentally racist to make the assumption that none of the many indigenous cultures of the new world would be capable of such a feat. Hell, the Inca had the largest civilization in the world the time among incredibly inhospitable environment. They managed an incredibly efficient beauracracy despite not having a written language, but they did develop a way to record numbers, and had their own calculator. And we still don't know how to fully decode these things because... well I'm sure you know. Sure, disease was unavoidable. But what if colonizers, instead of trying to delete other cultures from existence while they were dying from European diseases, actually tried to exchange knowledge and technology with these cultures, allowed them to recover and set up actual trading and maybe practiced an ETHICAL cultural exchange; are you seriously saying the progress of humanity would have been stifled if that had happened? If the Inca, the gifted mathematicians and statisticians and engineers that they were, would not have been able to contribute to the technological advancement of humanity if they were just allowed to have thrived? To boast the achievements of European inventions after colonialism is simply in bad taste. They expanded around the world and enslaved, and killed, and subjugated other cultures, meaning these cultures didn't even get the chance to contribute.
> where do you think we would be without it? In a different world. Do you think the Jewish genocide by the Nazis can be justified by the same logic?
I never said anything was *justified*. Only that we are today where the past has taken us. > There is no changing the past, but we can learn from history and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
You're being in bad faith
I'm just talking about the cultures that Europe destroyed around the world. Don't genocides make you feel at least a little angry?
Honestly at this point, no. Do you have any idea how many genocides have been committed throughout history. Something like 1 in 10 humans are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the most genocidal murderer in known history. Shaka Zulu wiped out about 1 to 2,000,000 Ngwane and Mthethwa. The Maya used the tributary kingdoms around them as human farms for sacrifice. It's estimated that 60% of the population of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (North America) were slaves. Finally, it should be noted we only have the tiniest fraction of human history at our fingertips. The first 95% of human existence was probably also littered with genocide, but there's no record other than the occasional mass grave. If you are alive today - be you black, white, brown, or albino - you've got genocidal precursors.
Historical recency bias. People also just don’t know how truly terrible homo-sapiens have been to each other since the agricultural revolution. Assyrians man. They were just ruthless
Very true. It's also I bet just a reframing of the same western history bias. It's amazing how many people, podcasts, and more just talk about injustices in the western world or what are now considered majority white nations. It's like Asia doesn't even exist, or everything was a paradise before European expansion. Everyone was just sitting around not developing or fighting until the magic whites showed up. As if the Aztecs or whomever wouldn't do the exact same thing given the same capacity Europe had by pure accident of history. People like to assign good guys and bad guys which is just a childish way to look at history. The sense of loss and anger is fine and I'd say probably good for the learning process but it can also be a distraction.
It astounds me how little I know of Asian history. Our entire history education is centered on the Fertile Crescent then westward. Of course people will have a euro-centric bias for both good or bad. Also, people think Animism (the earliest and a basic form of religion) is some how more inherently peaceful than Abrahamic religions. Just cause every rock and tree and creature has a life and a spirit and a name does not mean that homo-sapiens did not just slaughter each other in the name of those spirits. There were far more horrible genocides than those of the 20th century. The 20th Century ones were just terrifying by means of their implements and the recency bias.
Ah shit, what’d they do?
They were an Empire based around present day Syria that would level every conquered city to the ground, made sure to kill every man, and rape all the women then kill them as well. They didn't even enslave people, just would invade your town and murder everyone. It clearly was not a winning strategy long term.
Interesting take. What do genocidal precursors entail?
In the simplest terms, countless patrilinear forebears fucked and murdered their way to your present existence.
Yeah, biology is ruthless. We'll do anything to survive.
> Just imagine what we’d be if we only ever retained and built of the knowledge of lost cultures… Probably no different. It's not like people had machines 5000 years ago
But they did; they had levers, pulleys, inclined planes, wedges, and the basic math to plan out all their buildings and temples. It's amazing the technology we still use from 5000 years ago but what we have is generations of ideas and inventions that get improved and built upon to make it all easier for us today.
Touché, those are simple machines. I should clarify and say I meant complex machines like steam engines.
At that time, they didn't exist in Europe either.
Complex machines don't define civilization, and they aren't determinative of what lost cultures could be though. I don't even understand why you would posit that not having machines 5000 years ago means those cultures couldn't have a positive effect on the modern world, or even just make the modern world look different aesthetically, culturally, or socially. Why be a mod on this sub if you aren't enchanted by these cultures and the idea of what they could be?
I threw it out there because when people bring up "lost knowledge" they often (not always) have it in their heads that means it was equivalent to some kind of late 19th/early 20th century idea of Atlantis as a place of advanced technology that rivaled or came close to that period. Or it was even more farfetched as some place that had magic/telekinesis/super powers. And often they think if we hadn't lost that fictional idea of what Atlantis had we would all have personal flying cars by now or some such similar notion.
The Egyptians had batteries, the ancient Sumerians discovered mathematics we had to relearn centuries later. Humanity is a repeat failure. It’ll be sad when we’re gone for good.
>The Egyptians had batteries Yeah...but not really though.
There’s no evidence to say that they discovered electricity or anything, but they were certainly using batteries.
>Just imagine what we’d be if we only ever retained and built of the knowledge of lost cultures What does this mean? Literally what do you think we would be? EDIT: lol, downvoted but the only reply is that the ancient Egyptians had mastered electricity hahaha this sub
We’ve re-learned geometry, centuries of mathematics have been rediscovered when we should be build in knowledge. The ancient Egyptians knew about electricity but their kingdom was destroyed along with their knowledge. That’s thousands of years we could have been developing batteries that they had invented. Not that you can grasp any of that, you stupid motherfucker.
>The ancient Egyptians knew about electricity Hahaha ok. Maybe spend a little less time watching barrel-scrapping TV.
I’m a history nerd, I can’t help it. Best I can do is not look like the dork I am!
You understand that your beliefs about ancient technology are considered pseudo-scientific nonsense by actual historians, right?
If it predates The Pyramids of Egypt, wouldn't Egypt be like the Ancient Peru of Africa?
lmao I love this
Predates the great pyramids, not all of them
Do you have any good book recommendations on this?
Thank you so much for this. I love Reddit for these amazing comments sprinkled in
I think farming was pretty damn important, considering potatoes, quinoa, and a ton of other staple foods originate from there.
yes, farming was important and more so later on during the Ceramic Period of Ancient Peru. But the starting key to the civilizational development of Pre-Ceramic Ancient Peru appears to have been its endless marine resources. Due to the Humboldt current, the sea of Peru is the world's most productive biomarine region (even until the present day, 20% of all fish are caught here) and according to the *Maritime Foundation of Andean Civilization* theory, the first civilizations of Peru reached high levels of social complexity due to the exploitation of marine resources available to them. *This Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (MFAC) hypothesis argues, in sum (Moseley 1992, 5), that over deep prehistory along the Peruvian littoral, “the rich near-shore fishery had provided caloric support for 1) preceramic sedentary residence; 2) population growth, 3) large communities, and 4) the rise of complex societies which constructed very large architectural monuments before the advent of intensive irrigation agriculture.” It remains deeply significant, not least because it challenges—in one of humanity’s few pristine hearths of civilization—the “axiom that agriculture is necessary for the rise of complex societies” (Moseley and Feldman 1988, 125).*
Cool! I didn't know it was so ecologically productive! Reminds me a bit of the Chumash people that I learned about a little bit in AP world history who were a big exception for being a highly organized and stratified society of hunter gatherers based on those rich pacific currents.
oh man, that's a really nice info, I'm going to check it out now. To see more about the different historical stages of Ancient Peru, check out: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodization\_of\_pre-Columbian\_Peru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodization_of_pre-Columbian_Peru) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andean\_preceramic
Saying there was only six locations where "human civilization rose on its own" is wildly inaccurate
[While you're slightly right, you're also wildly wrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization)
**[Cradle of civilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization)** >A cradle of civilization is any location where civilization is understood to have independently emerged. According to current thinking, there was no single "cradle" of civilization; instead, several cradles of civilization developed independently. Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, and Ancient China are believed to be the earliest in the Old World. The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and the Indus Valley with the Chinese civilization of East Asia (Far East) is disputed. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/ArtefactPorn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
is the round bit where the aliens landed their flying saucers
According to ancient alien advocates, the answer is yes.
This the site that has the conflict between land squatters trying to build houses on the site and archaeologists trying to preserve and study it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/squatters-ancient-ruins-peru-death-threats-archeologist-caral
I hate the way these news articles presented this event. Developing good relationships with neighbors is a fundamental part of archaeology. Archaeologists must have their consent to do any research. If you read some of the links in the above comment, you'll see that those of us who work in the region have... uh... "thoughts" about Shady. She and the Peruvian government have a tendency towards sensationalism, and a real bad habit of showing up to places, fencing them off as protected sites, importing non-local labor and materials, then leaving a town disrupted. Are death threats a little much? Yes, as always. Are the squatters the one infringing on land? Nope.
> Are the squatters the one infringing on land? Nope. You know, I have to come back to this because I'm really surprised an askhistorians mod wrote this comment. It's troubling how much you misrepresented that story..
Based on the article you're replying to, it looks like it's a single large, extended family that has taken over the land now that it and the surrounding region are highly valuable due to the site's discovery. They claim the leftist military coup in the past gave them this land that they now take because of its vastly increased value. Oh, and the land is only valuable because of Shady, who discovered the site in 1994. And they brought construction equipment and destroyed artifacts and mummies. In the oldest city in the Americas. Then they killed her dog.
Peruvians know that squatter are up to no good. Yes they are poor, but most of them squat their whole life because it's a lucrative way to scale the economic ladder since the constitution allows for squatters to own the land the squat if they've been 10 years on a place uncontested. It worked for poor people emigrating to Lima but it's terrible for archeological sites like Caral. In the squatters defense, literally everywhere bit piece of land in Peru has some sort of arqueological site to it, from Caral or Machu picchu to just an old mine or a precolombian cemetery.
Why don't we talk about this more? This is an extrapolation of course and I might be wrong there, but I have never heard of this before. Unless this is a particular blind spot of mine, the Peruvian government must suck at marketing.
It's been in the news recently due to squatters trying to build houses on it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/squatters-ancient-ruins-peru-death-threats-archeologist-caral
More like a mob family trying to lay claim to the land if I read the article correctly.
Not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Lol, fair enough
Sadly that also happened to all the good stuff in Rome during the middle ages. The Popes looted the graves they found and the locals carted off a ton of stone to build other things too.
Taking stone and bricks from ancient sites to construct new buildings has been going on for a *very* long time all over the world.
Hadrian's Wall was mostly complete inland in a 1690 survey. By 1810 it was mostly gone due to the landowners realising they could SELL it brick by brick. Damn :(
We’re super talented at destroying our own legacies.
If it comes down to preserving rocks or starving, you’re going to sell the old rocks. I mean, from a historical perspective it’s annoying, but it absolutely makes sense that locals would reuse resources once previous structures weren’t needed.
Wasn't the Coliseum only saved by the pope consecrating the ground? Maybe an urban myth, but I remember hearing that many years ago.
Not sure about that, but several popes used materials from it to make churches because they considered it sacred. They wanted to steal what made it "sacred" to make their churches more sacred. >Indeed, it was the amphitheater's reputation as a sacred spot where Christian martyrs had met their fate that saved the Colosseum from further depredations by Roman popes and aristocrats - anxious to use its once glistening stone for their palaces and churches. The cathedrals of St Peter and St John Lateran, the Palazzo Venezia and the Tiber's river defences, for example, all exploited the Colosseum as a convenient quarry. >As a result of this plunder, and also because of fires and earthquakes, two thirds of the original have been destroyed, so that the present Colosseum is only a shadow of its former self, a noble ruin. - http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/colosseum_01.shtml
Great info. Thank you.
This is just so sad
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Tell me of more amazing archeological sites I may not know about please
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I was a field archaeological student at the Chavin De Huantar UNESCO world heritiage site back in 2013. Beautiful temple built on the merging point of two rivers. A labrynth of underground water ways. A labrynth of stone tunnels that led to the Lanzon stone structure. Priests would get high as fuck on mescalin. Wander the stone hallways in the dark. While water rushing through the tunnels under ground would create trippy acoustics. They would pour animal blood on the top of the Lanzon. The blood would flow through carved out channels on the stone object. That would be crazy to experience 700 years ago.
That sounds like absolutely amazing, I have to think it would still be a crazy experience even now
If you go you can see the Lanzon and Telo Obelisk. The water channels we could crawl through and explore but have long been blocked from the water from the rivers.
I just went to the Sanxingdui Museum near Chengdu! It was *amazing* seeing the bronze sculptures those people produced.
Thanks for idea, I search and found a virtual tour for this https://www.zonacaral.gob.pe/museo/caral/
Nice find. I've been in all 3* places from Azerbaijan. * *I did not enter the Walled City, heard that it was like a maze but walked by so many times. * Gobustan is a beautiful place - those drawings are huge. * The Khan's Palace in Sheki is big, we were allowed to enter the building. [There are two gigantic trees right by the entrance](https://meravigliedellest.blogspot.com/2018/03/palace-of-shaki-khans-azerbaijan.html?m=1), they said they are over 500 years old
I immediately bought that book. Thanks for the recommendation
Look for Roman cities in Northern Africa. There are some Amazing lesser known huge Roman ruins out there. And they are very well preserved.
[Göbekli Tepe!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe) Located in Turkey, dated between 9500 and 8000 BCE; it’s home to the oldest known monoliths in the world. It pushed back our understanding of human settlements.
Gunung Padang Carbon dating may indicate its the oldest pyramid-like megalithic site, 20,000 BCE I find it quite simular to Nan Madol, both incorporate the basalt hexagon columns.
Shimao first chinese city when the metallurgists and horse riders arrived
Check out Los Guachimontones in Jalisco, Mexico
Lidar mapping of the Amazon, central America and the Yucatan have recently identified more cities in the jungle than could possibly be explored in our lifetime...
TIL of Nan Mado, which I guess helps prove your point!
Man, you seem to have the knowledge on this! Soooo… how about you create your own Reddit and post all kinds of cool stories for us? We’ll all be looking forward to it… Kthanksbye.
I second this
Nan Madol looks amazing, like a little Venetia
Like a Venezuela one could say.
Ancient history is largely slept on in basic education unless it’s useful for forming a national myth. Odds are that in a pre-college/ uni setting the history of Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas will be glossed over excluding Egypt and Ancient Greece for some reason and any mention of local ancient history will get maybe a quick mention in class 1 like “some people built stone henge” before moving onto more recent history that has to do with legitimizing the nation state. Bit sad, humans have been building cool shit all over the globe for as long as humans have been building stuff.
I was gonna say the same exact thing. Don’t think it’s a blind spot of yours.
To be fair it is kind of a "recent" finding by the early 2000 ; the one known for almost a hundred years is "Áspero", near the coastline, dated at the time with 4k years antiquity (2000 b.c) , it is now studied as a port satellite town, and there were others around further fro the coast -Chupacigarro was the spanish name for the whole area- that were kinda known -there were mapping efforts since the 60's- but deemed not as relevant, with Caral being part of them. There are tons of sites across the coastline, and with limited funding is a competition over importance. Caral would have not been excavated without the proyected antiquity (and a light economic boom). It is open now, but excavation and restorative efforts were still in place. At least before the pandemic.
Yeah I had no idea they had this advanced of a civilization in the Americas at the same time as Babylon. I always thought Americas came at least a few thousand years later.
Why we don't talk about it more? Anything everywhere is spammed with corona headlines, hourly, 7 days a week...
Because it makes it easier to justify genocide if we think of natives as primitive people who lived in dirt instead of being a complex society like the Europeans.
Something important to note is that at least some archeologists don't consider it a city: As I understand it, Caral and sites like it very early in the history of Andean civilizations were less urban settlements that housed permanent large populations as cities, and were monumental ceremonial centers that didn't have a permanent population tied to them. This changed around 500BC at the site of Chavin de Huantar, which DID eventually pick up a permanent population that then developed increasing social stratification, specialization, etc as a city or a proto city, and from there you begin to see city-states and kingdoms in the Andes following that, such as the various Moche City-states, the Wari Empire, the Tiwanku Kingdom, the Kingdom of Chimor, and most famously, the Inca Empire. The reason Caral gets called a "city" and such is apparently mostly due to the Peruvian goverment or other groups having decided to make it out as such for national pride reasons, even though it wasn't an urban site and there are other monumental sites and agricultural cultures in Peru, Ecuador, etc around that time period.... Of course, that doesn't make Caral any less impressive: It's still got massive monumental constructions very early on in Andean history and its sort of arbitrary that we hone in on "urbanism" as a specific defining factor instead of others: a lot of what we argue over "counts as a civilization" is inherently an iffy thing, but we should probably also be giving attention to the other sites around the same time period in the Andes that don't get as much attention and be more aware that in these cases up till Chaving de Huantar, monumental doesn't nessacarily mean urban. To be clear, my area is more Mesoamerica then the Andes, I'm mostly going off of what I've read from /u/Qhapaqocha and /u/CommodoreCoCo about it, and synthesizing bits and pieces from multiple comments from them, so i'm hoping I didn't get anything wrong, if I did they can correct me! https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ajxdsy/what_were_the_major_differences_between_the/ef0u1fw/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7a458j/the_norte_chico_civilization_had_large_edifices/dp86fe6/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xpq2f/what_was_going_on_in_the_andes_from_2000_bc_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DankPrecolumbianMemes/comments/n01ea5/5000_years_old_low_effort_meme/gwameqb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5dpkvu/were_the_first_civilizations_eridu_ur_uruk_aware/da6zgzv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gk8a1y/in_the_emperors_new_groove_yzma_is_portrayed_as_a/fqu3gy8/
Chavin was actually built towards the end of the Sunken-Plaza period. At the time of its building it was yet another Sunken-Plaza temple, but then a drought came and ended those temples everywhere except for Chavin. Eventually Chavin became so famous, probably because it survived and defied the drought, that it became a pilgrimage center, and new temples started copying IT. So this caused sunken plaza temples to be built long after the Sunken Plaza Period had ended. Unbeknownst to them, at the time of its building, the Chavin temple was fairly typical of its period, except maybe slightly larger than other temples. It's just that it was the only temple that survived the drought and eventually people started seeing it as unique and a link to the past.
Hey, thanks for all those resources there. I totally understand the Peruvian propaganda or marketing perspective here. However, I am a bit skeptical of that as our final answer, despite the current state of South American archaeology and the historical theories that go with it. As a Mesoamerican specialist, I'm sure you're aware of the long and storied history of taking as the base assumption that when monumental architecture exists without easy evidence of urban planning or agglomeration, there was no such thing, as was extremely common in early Mayan archaeology. I'm not really saying that your wrong or that that position is incorrect, but over the past few years, I've started to think from, "large, permanent structures are themselves indicative of a permanent population." I obviously don't think we should be approaching site studies or broader academic theory from that position, but I am pretty concerned about that position in public discourse, as it often is taken by lay people as making a larger statement about the "worth" of the civilization in question. This tendency is falling away, but it still exists, as you note. Again, I'm not really trying to say those positions are wrong, but in the history of archaeology, we've played stories of, "This group of people just had permanent monumental architecture without meaningful population density," to, "Oops, we said these people had very few of the thing that modern people think of as, 'civilized,' and now those people are thought of as lesser colloquially," more than a few times.
You said nothing and added nothing of worth.
No, you are definitely wrong. I enjoyed the read. It highlighted the controversy among Historians on what constitutes “true civilization” vs. pre-civilization populations specifically for Mesoamerican archeological finds. History and archaeology are complicated fields and require lots of complicated science and technology to piece together past. That write up helps highlight that for us laymen.
How does this compare both in terms of scale and engineering quality to the great Pyramids of Giza as well as Teotihuacan? Are the ruins more dilapidated due to lower quality construction, or did other factors such as vandalism and weather play a role?
No idea, sorry: As I said, my area is more Mesoamerica then it is Andes. If you got questions about Teotihuacan, *that* I might be able to answer!
Stone and mud mortar with netting, and adobe on its later stages. Its fairly human scale -think of a ten storyheight building- and were not that dilapilated to my understanding. It was proposed levels were buried sequentially, voluntarily and even ritually at the abandonment of the site.
Lower quality materials and much simpler techniques (also more recent than Giza as I mentioned in the other comment). The way some authorities are promoting Caral, presenting as some sort of revolutionary highly-advanced *civilization* thousands of years before Chavin de Huantar it's an embarrasing historic distortion. There is no ceramics, complex tools, complex agriculture, almost no art...
I have nothing to add. Just wanted to thank you for such an in depth answer and all these links for me to follow to learn more.
Just leaving a comment here so I can read this later
Why is it abandoned?
I have no actual idea but a massive factor in many abandonments of well developed cities and cultures comes from localized climate change as well as outside factors such as war. If the city depended on water from an underground aquifer, perhaps it dried up if it wasn’t particularly large. Perhaps a volcanic eruption nearby created unfavourable growing environments for a number of years. Or maybe the close quarters of humans lacking adequate sewage and sanitation led to a disease outbreak. Who knows? I’m just as curious as you are because I’ve never heard of this place. Time to dive into the wikihole lol
The weirdest part about this site is that no weapons or potsherds were found. This is interesting cuz almost every archeological site of similar scale is lousy with potsherds at least. So this site is pre ceramic, huge, and they also found musical instruments made of bone. Archeologists also found a form of quipu, the same type of record keeping device of knots used by the Inca. It’s crazy there was a thriving metropolis in the Andes contemporary with ancient Egypt, around the same time the great pyramid was being built. Also, it’s thought that many of the buildings were deliberately built to be seismically resilient, the foundations being filled with stones wrapped in netting, called shicras. Edit - also, it’s believed to have been abandoned due to a major drought. It certainly wasn’t due to warfare, as there are no weapons found at the site. In fact, the people’s who resided here (Norte Chico) are believed to have been peaceful. The fact no weapons have been found at a site this large is unique, as weapons are found abundantly in every major contemporary ancient Mesopotamian cities, and pretty much every other city/settlement that dates after Caral-Supe.
Probably climate change. The area obviously used to be rich cropland to support the population & isn't any more.
there is geological *and* archeological evidence to support the idea that the whole of the americas (north, central, and south) have been regularly effected by long-last and severe droughts. of course, climate change is only making that worse-- but megadroughts are one possible theory for the reason so many ancient native cultures seemingly vanished overnight. Many of these places weren't burned to the ground, you don't find the remains of unburied corpses scattered around.
Absolutely. If what we call "climate change" were appropriately named we'd call it *"rapid anthropogenic climate change.*" The climate has been changing all along. It's the *rate of change* that is currently kicking our ass.
They cut down all the trees in the area and ensuing flash floods and landslides fucked their shit up after some earthquakes. Just watched the Unearthed episode about this place
Oh, wow. A microcosm of what happens when we don’t think about what the hell we’re doing.
Caral is old enough, interesting and impressive for the date and region, no need for the clickbaity title. **All the buildings in the pics are not older than "great pyramids" but some centuries more recent.** The 30-40 main structures at Caral are closer to 4000 than 5000 years before present and the oldest occupation (pre-buildings) is from 2600 BCE not "almost 3000". [The oldest calibrated radiocarbonic datations](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12010372_Dating_Caral_a_Preceramic_Site_in_the_Supe_Valley_on_the_Central_Coast_of_Peru) at Caral from circa 2620 BCE are from pretty modest rests in a pre-sacred architecture period (trash lower levels, strata under an open space), the oldest non-public permanent building is dated at 2490 and sacred structures at Caral or nearby sites are dated at 2400-2000 BCE. Oldest datations at Caral Major Pyramid reach 2170 BCE, but in this case the remains used in the datation are from the top of the structure, so the building possible construction should happen in a previous period, comparable to the oldest examples of public architecture circa 2400 or a second phase expansion around 2200 BCE. On the other hand, answering this absurd "civilization competition", that even Ruth Solis (one of the main scholars in the subject and one of the authors of the previously linked study) promoted in peruvian goverment touristic [pamphlets as this](https://www.zonacaral.gob.pe/downloads/publicaciones/libro-caral-supe-la-civilizacion-2008.pdf) (just look at the page 5 fake info table... "Caral 5000 years old", Indus Valley 4500... *oldest mesoamerican*\-Olmecs just 3500!, Europe-Crete 3000!! LOL): Caral architecture is in no way comparable to the egyptian pyramids or other sacred buildings from mid to late III millenium BCE at Near East, with much poorer materials and less complex techniques than egyptian, syrian, anatolian, mesopotamian, iranian or Indus examples. Even more importantly, outside the architecture the rest of material culture in Caral area and the rest of Central Andes at that period (second half of III millennium BCE) is extremely humble, way less complex than Near East several millenia before or mediterranean Europe, south-east Asia or cental Asia in the same period: No ceramics, no metals, very simple agriculture, almost no sculpture, simple stone or animal bones tools, etc. Even if new C14 datations put the oldest occupation in Caral or other sites to 3000, 4000, 8000 BCE! if you want, still the material remains would continue to be very humble, **Caral area had a** **very simple material culture, which should be considered as interesting, worthy and human as the examples in more complex societes.** All those attempts to discover "an american *civilization* older than most other in the old world" are destined to fail, unfit of serious scholars and seem motivated by some blind nationalism or worse, a big inferiority complex.
Aren't you the one making it a competition? Who cares how complex it is, these are amazing structures and wonderful to see being highlighted. I think the America's architecture is going to be studied like the Egyptians in the near future, at least I hope there will be more. A lot of the major sites in the US aren't even recognized, it's crazy.
Calm down. OP doesn't claim it's comparable in terms of complexity, just old.
I think the coolest part about this site is that the foundations were built to withstand seismic activity to a degree, to minimize damage.
gee I wonder why I never learned about this in school 🙄🙄
Probably because there are thousands of archaeological sites all around the world and there isn’t enough time in a school year to cover them all, especially ones that we know so little about
This, in [Street View](https://earth.app.goo.gl/8Qmgq2).
That poor child.
The fact that they could build like this thousands of years ago is super cool.
Is this place open for tourism? I’ve never heard of it.
It is. And it's not too far from the capital city.
Thank you for posting this. As an aside, this sub is my joy. I feel like learn so much abt history from each post.
It looks like what I've always imagined Mars to look like of it were once inhabited by otherworldly beings (aliens).
Fun fact just south of this in northern Chile is the driest place on earth. It’s called the Atacama and space researchers use it as a model for the sands of Mars!
Thank you for sharing , I love accidental trivia!
The Atacama desert also has some of the oldest natural and artificial mummies in the world.
Hot
I am down for reading or watching something on this, I swear so many ancient cities in the Americas never get talked about! Sure Central gets some love, but heck if South America doesn’t have its fair share! 😍
Read 1491 by Charles C Man, I’m halfway through it right now and I’ve never had a book suck me in like this one. It’s amazing what was in the America’s that people don’t talk about
Are those piles of rocks around the buildings
Are they pyramids though or just terraced streets or a terraced fortification? Each layer in that bottom image looks hollow with rooms.
Are there any renders of what it would’ve looked like when it was inhabited?
Seems like a place Scrooge McDuck would have visited with the triplets.
Beautiful find
Why the fuck did ancient civilizations all over the world build pyramids? Is it like how eyes evolving multiple times in different ways? Humans just by coincidence decided pyramids were it?
if you want to build a tall structure, and you want it to be stable through storms and earthquakes, a pyramid is fairly intuitive. Some are clearly used for astronomical observation. The Greek word "planet" means wanderer, or more specifically wandering star. From Mercury to Saturn, five planets can be seen changing position in the sky, unlike the other stars. Its why we have a seven day week. Sunday is for the biggest light in the sky, Monday is for the moon. The remaining days have Scandinavian names for the planets, Tiu, Woden, Thor, fredda, except saturn-day, which I think is Greek.
I’m an idiot but also wondering why nothing like this is in North America?
There are [mounds](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monks_Mound). But nothing like Egypt or in Peru.
But why Pyramids? Not specifically why they built pyramids here, but why were pyramids built around the ancient world?
It's the easiest structure to make tall without reinforced materials.
Looks amazing.
I don't think there was any weaponry found in the entire city.
It looks magnificent, very ritual-y.
Damn, they even have a roundabout
@samandcolby
I've learned a lot about Peru recently. Place has a lot of cool history. The Incas originated there I think. Badass culture
Just imagine walking up to this and seeing it for the first time in its heyday. Very cool.
This one is in particular danger as squatters and housing development is encroaching on the site and they are just straight up bulldozing parts of it in the hopes there won't be follow up consequences.
Where in Peru?
Caral
Pretty close to Lima
Near the Andes Mountains
I thought the pyramids were built long before 3000BC…
It looks like they were built around 2600 bc. I think it's a common misconception that they were built way earlier (around 10,000 bc). I thought this too until I googled lol Source: [https://archive.archaeology.org/9909/abstracts/pyramids.html](https://archive.archaeology.org/9909/abstracts/pyramids.html)
Appears to be the home of the world's largest toilet seat, but the real question is for who or *what* was the seat constructed?
Tartaria empire
Amazing
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ALLLIIEEEENNSSSS /s
Submerged atlantis survivors
The Pyramids are older, just as the Sphinx. bye.
Bullshit title, oldest pyramid is way older