Many ancient sites are known to exist throughout the Andes, but only a small portion of them have been excavated. One such site, Caral, was discovered in the Supe Valley of Peru in 1905, in a remote desert location. At that time, the large temple mounds of Caral were thought to be the work of people of fairly recent times, and the site was ignored for years. During those years, the mounds were covered by sands that the wind swept into hill-like formations. Ninety years later, in 1994, Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solis made her way to Caral. What appeared to her at first to be huge hills made of sand turned out to be gigantic temple mounds, or pyramids, covering a vast area--160 acres (.25 square miles/.65 square kilometers). Intrigued, Shady Solis and a team began to sift through the region surrounding the pyramids. They discovered a mysterious lack of ceramic artifacts, indicating that Caral had almost certainly existed and thrived before ceramics came into use in the Americas (which began around 1800 B.C.E.).

Shady Solis decided to begin an excavation of the Caral pyramids, a huge undertaking for which she recruited the Peruvian army. Caral's largest pyramid--"the size of four football fields and … 60 feet (18.3 meters) tall," according to John F. Ross in a 2002 Smithsonian report--was excavated first. In the walls of this pyramid, the archaeological team found, among many other things, the reeds from shicra bags that had been used to carry stones to the building site (the stones were left in the bags and piled up to form the walls). Because reeds are organic (once living) matter, scientists were able to use a special testing procedure called radiocarbon dating to determine the age of the shicra materials. The test results showed that the materials came from a range of years between 2600 and 2000 B.C.E. This information meant that the site was older than anyone had believed possible. It proved, to the surprise of archaeologists everywhere, that the pyramids of Caral were built at about the same time as the pyramids of ancient Egypt.

The surprises continued. Caral's pyramids were huge and very complex, and the artifacts in them revealed a complicated society that previous archaeological work had not indicated. Shady Solis's team uncovered six pyramids around a central plaza. Piramide Mayor, the largest, was terraced and had huge staircases leading up to a platform. At the top were rooms that were probably used for ceremonies. Altogether there were three huge, sunken circular plazas, one of which was about 150 feet (46 meters) in diameter. In one plaza there were numerous houses. Next to the plaza and pyramids stood a temple and a sunken amphitheater (a large circular building with rising seating surrounding an open space), which was large enough to accommodate hundreds of people attending public events. In the amphitheater the team found thirty-two flutes carved from the bones of large birds. Later many more musical instruments were found in the amphitheater, made from the bones of deer and llamas. Just outside the central area encompassing the buildings and plazas described above there were residential areas. Perhaps this was where the workers lived. The size of the monuments indicates that there were probably thousands of laborers working constantly at this public monument over a period of many years.

The architecture of Caral provides evidence that there were distinct social classes within the community. The smaller pyramids had rooms at their tops to house the community's most powerful families--the priests and political leaders. A variety of neighborhoods surround the center. Neighborhoods with adobe houses and buildings not unlike modern apartment buildings, with units for different families' use, were probably home to the middle class--the artisans, or craftspeople (particularly weavers), administrators, and traders. In other neighborhoods, houses made of cane or thatch and mud probably gave shelter to the working-class residents of Caral, people who worked on farms or labored building the monuments. Although no one knows how many people lived in Caral in its heyday, most experts agree that its permanent residents numbered in the thousands.

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