Two weekend ago, I visited the ruins of Caral with my friend Roger. The ruins received their name from the nearby village of Caral, which is located in an aesthetically spectacular river valley called Supe about 100 miles north of Lima.
The history of the ruins and the story of their discovery are both remarkable. Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady only popularized the site in the mid-1990s when she revealed the magnitude of the ruins: A city of pyramids in the Peruvian desert, with an elaborate complex of temples, an amphitheater and ordinary houses. Before the mid-1990s, even local Peruvians were unaware of the site’s existence; they thought the pyramids — covered in millennia of sand — were merely sand dunes.
What was surprising was not only the size of the archaeological site at Caral but also its age. It turned out that Caral was inhabited between roughly 2600 B.C. and 2000 B.C., making it the most ancient city in the Americas and possibly even the entire world. Amazingly, it was essentially unknown until twenty years ago and continues to be low on the radar of Peruvian and foreign tourists alike. I suspect that in ten or twenty years, after more archaeological excavation has been completed, Caral will be one of Peru’s most famous destinations.
Here are a few photos:
The road from the ruins of Caral to the village of Caral.
The Super River Valley transforms a desert into a swath of green.
The road to the ruins.
Roger posing at the entrance.
The ruins are in a sandy desert next to the fertile region of the valley.
Me posing next to one of the 11 pyramids. Many are incompletely excavated.
A perfectly circular amphitheater built 4,000 years ago.
One of the larger pyramids at the site.