User:Abyssal/Prehistory of North America/Prehistory articles/25

The Norte Chico civilization (also Caral or Caral-Supe civilization) was a complex pre-Columbian society that included as many as 30 major population centers in what is now the Norte Chico region of north-central coastal Peru. Since the early 21st century, it has been established as the oldest known civilization in the Americas and one of the six sites where civilization originated independently in the ancient world. It flourished between 3rd and 1st millennia BC. The alternative name, Caral-Supe, is derived from the Sacred City of Caral in the Supe Valley, a large and well-studied Norte Chico site. Complex society in Norte Chico arose a millennium after Sumer in Mesopotamia, was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids, and predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two millennia.

In archaeological nomenclature, Norte Chico is a pre-ceramic culture of the pre-Columbian Late Archaic; it completely lacked ceramics and apparently had almost no visual art. The most impressive achievement of the civilization was its monumental architecture, including large earthwork platform mounds and sunken circular plazas. Archaeological evidence suggests use of textile technology and, possibly, the worship of common god symbols, both of which recur in pre-Columbian Andean cultures. Sophisticated government is assumed to have been required to manage the ancient Norte Chico. Questions remain over its organization, particularly the influence of food resources on politics. Some scholars have suggested that Norte Chico was founded on seafood and maritime resources, rather than development of an agricultural cereal and crop surpluses, as has been considered essential to the rise of other ancient civilizations.

Archaeologists have been aware of ancient sites in the area since at least the 1940s; early work occurred at Aspero on the coast, a site identified as early as 1905, and later at Caral further inland.

In the late 1990s Peruvian archaeologists, led by Dr. Ruth Shady Solís, provided the first extensive documentation of the civilization with work at Caral. A 2001 paper in Science, providing a survey of the Caral research, and a 2004 article in Nature, describing fieldwork and radiocarbon dating across a wider area, revealed Norte Chico's full significance and led to widespread interest. (see more...)