The Lost Pyramids of Caral
Filed under Mystery, 4 Comments,
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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April 21st, 2009 at 16:08
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..)
April 26th, 2009 at 11:56
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.
July 14th, 2009 at 21:01
The earliest known civilisation in the Americas is 4000 bc, well documented in a book called Earthly Remains. So that article is slightly inaccurate.
November 18th, 2009 at 20:27
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.