The Lost Pyramids of Caral
This is a pyramid that ranks as one of the largest in the world, period. It’s one that covers on the surface of the mound it covers like 15 football fields. The volume of it is some, we calculate something like two million cubic metres of material. The magnificent ancient city of pyramids at Caral in Peru hit the headlines in 2001. The site is a thousand years older than the earliest known civilization in the Americas and, at 2,627 BC, is as old as the pyramids of Egypt.
Many now believe it is the fabled missing link of archeology – a ‘mother city’. If so, then these extraordinary findings could finally answer one of the great questions of archeology: why did humans become civilized? (Excerpt from bbc.co.uk)
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so according to this doc, civilization started to get better access to sex, drugs and music. why am i not surprised? :)
(well besides the cotton & farming of course..)
Since when are humans civilized? We lie, cheat steal and butcher at a much more rapid rate than ever before in our history.. that’s hardly civilized.
While the soccer mom closes her garage using a controller made by a 14 year old girl in china she looks at the paint job on her gas guzzling minivan, and sighs, ohhh I’m so civilized.. meanwhile her lifestyle has resulted in the murder of over a million innocent people in the past ten years.
Good times.
The earliest known civilisation in the Americas is 4000 bc, well documented in a book called Earthly Remains. So that article is slightly inaccurate.
A worthy attempt, and I wanted to like it, but ultimately a frustrating documentary. Its presentation of archaeology and its supposed various “holy grails” and common concepts (like “crossing the Great Divide” or “the mother city”) is a profoundly misleading and tendentious hash. There’s a persistent implication that the religious site of Caral — really part of a complex of sites — is somehow telling us a universal truth about the founding of civilization; they do hedge this claim if you’re listening very carefully, mind you, but it’s done perfunctorily and it would be easy for a casual viewer to come away with ‘Caral as the universal template of early civilization’ as the basic message.
The inference that Caral must not have had warfare because it didn’t have fortifications is uncomfortably reminiscent of older starry-eyed theories about supposedly serene and pacifist civilizations like the Minoans and the Mayans, who also lacked fortifications but who — it since emerged — made plenty of war after all. Of course it could in fact be that Caral was relatively peaceful, but I’ll be taking the overconfident presentation of that assessment in this doc with a very large grain of salt until more facts are in.
They barely even touch on one of the most interesting things about the Norte Chico civilizational complex, which is that it seems to be an example of complex maritime forager societies spurring the development of civilization, in considerable contrast to the Neolithic farming template familiar from the “Old” World. I guess this made for less compelling glurge-fodder than the use of Caral to press forward a message about the power of pacifism — which isn’t an unworthy message but by now is one that arouses suspicion wherever it crops up in connection with archaeology, and with good reason.
Awsome. So we have a group of fish eating nympho cocaine using cotton growing people. Sounds great so what happened?
I just never can understand why western science insists that society and political ideology has to be war or domination and subjugation driven. A hangover from christianity and the idea that left to our own we will tend to devolve; when all the scientific and historical evidence points to the opposite (i.e. chaos theory).
just because people left a place doesn’t mean that society colapsed; there are ghost towns and reduced populations where there once were much larger ones all through out just our recent history, just because someone moved away doesn’t have to mean a massive societal collapse.
Documentary was way too dramatic. I much preferred listening to the unfolding of the story firsthand from an archeologist friend that had been there. The music was appalling. Whether it was composed for this or taken from other sources, it made it comical at times – taking away from the true magnitude of what was being discovered. It is such an interesting discovery. I would like to have heard more about what archeological methods were used to unearth the site, what geological forces led to the allusiveness of the city, what daily life was like, religion etc. There is a large amount of information missing, such as the relationship this civilization had to constellations. The dramatization in the narration and the epic movie soundtrack took much away from the naturally compelling story at hand. It assumed we’re too unintelligent to make conclusions, so they fed us fireworks and frills to keep us amused. -Great find nonetheless!
I hope someone else makes a more serious documentary on this fascinating subject, perhaps someone other than the Hollywood-izers.
As a biologist, I learned not to make all or nothing assumptions. Just because cities arose at nearly the same time in human history does not mean that they all arose the same way or for the same reasons. Rarely do we ever see black and white answers, but instead shades of grey. Many paleolithic tribes had made war against one another if only to protect hunting grounds. War did not “come many years later” as this documentary suggests. War has been present in hominids since hominids began. Our closest remaining primate relatives, the chimpanzees, show examples of warfare when rival clans come in contact with one another.
I’m sure there will be more documentaries about this site in the future. As far as we know, this was an area that was abandoned and the inhabitants went to a warring civilization a few miles over. So far, at the time of this doc, no other remains were found? Or, they’ll talk about that later. Lots to still learn about this site.
I agree about the music used…I thought oh wow, this is too dramatic for my taste, but I’d rather had a little more of that, instead of the obnoxious antics of Ken Feder. UGH! I cringe as soon as he shows up in any program.
Aww Geez –
Sometimes, while reading comments, I am reminded
of a statement made by a Psychiatrist during an interview
at a Los Angeles TV station in the 60′s —
He stated that the Author of the book “Jonathan Livingston
Seagull” “hatched the story in his anal tract”—
Oh Well ———–
Love Ya all anyway.
Sandy