Caral

     On the 30th, we went to the ruins of a city of the Caral civilization, the first PreColumbian civilization in the Americas to use agriculture. The city was founded approximately 4,500 years ago, and is the second oldest site of an agricultural civilization known. Only the state of Mesopotamia was older, for it was founded approximately 5,000 years ago. What is even more amazing is that the Caral civilization only had llamas and some vegetables to feed themselves, while the Mesopotamians had wheat, cattle, horses, and many more crops and livestock. Furthermore, the Caral only had one narrowly confined river valley to farm in, while the Mesopotamians had the entire fertile crescent. It could definitely be argued that the Caral created more with less.

     Like Pachacamac, the Caral ruins stood out of the modern settlement surrounding it. However, unlike Pachacamac, the ruins were surrounded by farms and greenery reminiscent of the conditions that must have drawn the city's founders. Amazingly, the Caral seem to have lived with minimal violence, since no tools or implements clearly meant to be weapons have been found in the ruins of their city yet. The ruins were organized, as our guide explained, in a circle to better observe the movements of the stars, moon, and sun. Most of the buildings were pyramid shaped stacks, some of them residential, others religious, and still others for governance. 

     In other words, the Caral were not so different from modern humans. They needed food, they needed shelter, they needed cultural institutions, and they needed good leadership. Despite the seemingly foreign and alien environment the Caral civilization started in, it awed me that they had many of the same institutions as modern societies.