About 12 miles from the Pacific Coast, the landscape is mostly barren and sandy. A rough semblance of a road leads from the city to a small, empty section of land.

Between a couple of life-sustaining rivers, the stark land of ancient Caral, Peru, is dotted with six immense truncated pyramids. Winifred Creamer and her research team think these are the signs of the oldest civilization in the Americas.

Creamer, an NIU associate professor of anthropology, and a small research team believe the pyramids date back as far as 2627 B.C., the same time that Egyptians were building their own great pyramids.

“This is one of the most interesting projects I’ve ever worked on,” Creamer said. “And it’s of interest to a lot of people. It shows that people lived in pretty complex groups and organized complex projects earlier than we thought.”

Radiocarbon dating puts the site’s age nearly 800 years earlier than experts previously placed the Americas’ oldest civilization.

Jonathan Haas, a curator at the Chicago Field Museum and Creamer’s husband, joined his wife and Ruth Shady of San Marcos University in Lima, and their findings are detailed in the April 27 issue of the journal Science.

Research and development

The researchers say Caral is one of 18 local archaeological sites developed during the same era. The pyramids now appear only as large mounds because the area hasn’t received much attention. Caral was identified in 1905, but Creamer said because its civilization peaked before the ceramic age, most researchers didn’t focus on the site because it lacked artifacts.

The researchers’ quarters illustrate this negligence: A lack of electricity, drinking water and paved roads forced Creamer and Haas to the coast when not researching. And even though it was only a 12-mile drive, the trip took about an hour each way, Creamer said.

“The real irony is that the peak of civilization in this area happened before 2000 B.C.,” she said. “Nothing much has happened in this valley since.”

What Creamer and company did find in the Andes mountains’ Supe Valley, though, reveals plenty of complexities for such an ancient civilization. Creamer said the people didn’t have a stable food supply, so they used cotton string to trade for fish on the coast. The string was used for fish nets, forming a “very symbiotic relationship.”

“In most societies with big, monumental constructions, people usually paid in grains,” she said. “Here, it appears to be based on fish.”

Just how many people lived in the civilization is unknown, but what the people accomplished required some complex planning. Creamer believes Peruvians were among the first to use irrigation to battle the harsh dryness.

Also, plenty of planning went into a flattened pinnacle topped by a 60-foot-high and 500-by-400-foot-based terraced pyramid called Piramide Mayor.

The dating process

Creamer said the Peruvians used mesh bags made of reeds to haul rocks to the construction sites, and researchers used these bags to nail down the age of the pyramids and the civilization itself.

“When you try to say something is the earliest of its time, people look at that very closely,” Creamer said.

Shady used samples of the mesh bags in the radiocarbon dating process. The research team was in luck, because the reeds were the annual plants necessary for the process.

And in this case, the area’s dryness was a good thing. The reeds were preserved perfectly, providing the most reliable dates.

The civilization looks to be comprised of much more than the major pyramids. The research team already has found what looks to be high-status housing, a neighborhood of adobe dwellings and more rudimentary dwellings probably for servants or peasants.

Researchers believe Caral residents probably left when better forms of irrigation came to fruition in more fertile areas.

An ancient reconsideration

Creamer said the two years’ worth of trips to Caral represent the start of her research team’s efforts in the area. The work with Haas, Shady and Peruvian students will continue with more intensive study.

“We hope to keep going on it for several more years,” she said.

New focuses will include the Caral area’s political system and a look at the diets of the Peruvian people, both topics that will take more time.

This summer, Creamer will take two NIU graduate students to the area, and next year, Creamer said there may even be a summer school class to an area she thinks will alter and invigorate new thoughts in the field of anthropology.

“This makes us reconsider ancient civilizations,” she said.