Karl, perhaps civilization developed manly to deal with natural disasters. New ancient civilization was found in Peru�Pyramids as in ancient Egypt and Yucatan. How did they develop the math, organization & tech. skills?: Carl:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/science/28peru.html?oref=login&p agewanted=print&position=
NY TIMES
December 28, 2004
Evidence of Ancient Civilization Is Found in Peruvian Countryside
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
On the coastal valleys of Peru, more than 100 miles north of Lima,
archaeologists are seeing in the contours of the dune-covered landscape
visions of a distant past. Mounds rise from the plains every mile or so,
sometimes closer to one another.
They cover ruins of imposing ceremonial centers of a complex agricultural
society that flourished there as early as 5,000 years ago.
The valleys region, which runs from the interior to the Pacific Coast, is
thought to be the area where people in the Americas first diverged from
simple hunting and gathering and developed a highly structured culture
with large urban centers and monumental architecture. Excavations of a
site known as Caral, an inland city occupied for five centuries, beginning
about 2600 B.C., were reported three years ago.
Now, archaeologists are widening the investigation. They have surveyed the
mounds of more than 20 major centers of the ancient culture, and their
radiocarbon dates have established that the first of these imposing sites
were occupied by 3100 B.C., more than 400 years earlier than any other
similar settlements in South America.
"These sites are monumental in every sense of the word," Dr. Jonathan
Haas, an archaeologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a telephone
interview. "There's nothing like this in the rest of the Peruvian
countryside for this period of time."
Dr. Haas and Dr. Winifred Creamer of Northern Illinois University, who are
a husband-and-wife archaeological team, reported the results of their
exploratory excavations and dating tests in the current issue of the
journal Nature. Alvaro Ruiz, a Northern Illinois graduate student, was a
co-author.
The researchers said their findings confirmed the emergence, development
and continuous occupation of a major cultural complex in this region
during the Late Archaic period, from at least 3000 B.C. to 1800 B.C.
At the same time, cities were rising on the Nile and the Tigris and
Euphrates Rivers in the Middle East, and the pyramids of Egypt were being
built.
Dr. Creamer said in a statement by her university that the society
inhabited "a whole region, a whole culture, where people were organized to
produce something their world hadn't see before." She added, "The people
who built the first of these pyramids and plazas had no model to go by and
no precedent to use in building monuments and organizing labor on a large
scale."
The society, the archaeologists concluded, was based on agriculture,
including cotton as well as foodstuff, and was supported by widespread
irrigation canals. The presence of huge pyramids, broad ceremonial plazas
and extensive residential areas around the monumental core suggested that
the culture probably had a well-defined social hierarchy, centralized
decision making and formalized religion.
Caral, the most extensively excavated site, is in the valley of the Supe
River. Many of the other sites are along the Pativilca and Fortaleza
Rivers. The region is part of Norte Chico, or Little North, an area that
stretches from the Andes to the Pacific coast in central Peru.
Most of the settlements were no more than a day's walk from one another.
They ranged in area from 25 to more than 250 acres. At the center of them
were rectangular terraced pyramids built of stone and earth. At the top
were several rooms, the purpose of which cannot be discerned.
Some archaeologists have interpreted the discovery of the advanced inland
culture as a blow to the conventional maritime hypothesis, which held that
coastal fishing communities were responsible for the evolution of more
complex social and political societies in the Andes.
The absence of ceramics by the Peruvian cultures at this time puzzled
scholars, who generally thought pottery and farming evolved more or less
simultaneously.
But the new dates indicate that both the coastal and inland communities
contributed to the cultural transformation. Cotton grown inland was used
to make the nets for catching anchovies.
But the researchers said it was "not feasible" to view the maritime
development at Aspero, a site at the mouth of the Supe River, "as having
preceded the large-scale inland occupation."
In their report, Dr. Haas and Dr. Creamer said, "What is clear from the
new body of dates is that the early development of complex societies along
the Peruvian coast in the Late Archaic involved an extensive inland
occupation based on irrigation agriculture coupled with a more localized
and much smaller-scale maritime occupation on the coast."
Dr. Craig Morris, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural
History in Manhattan, who specializes in Peruvian archaeology, said it was
premature to be drawing firm conclusions about the relationships between
the coastal and inland cultures. The two may prove to have been
contemporaneous, he said.
"We will need more excavations to know what the inland people were doing
and how they were living," said Dr. Morris, who was not involved in the
Haas-Creamer project. "But this is a very important beginning, and it
shows that these people had a culture of considerable complexity, with
social stratification and political centralization, at a very early
period."
