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5 500-year-old plaza found
26/02/2008 12:43 - (SA)
Andrew Whalen
Lima - A team of German and Peruvian archaeologists say they have discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5 500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast.
Carbon dating of material from the site revealed it was built between 3500 BC and 3000 BC, Peter Fuchs, a German archaeologist who headed the excavation team, said by telephone on Monday.
The discovery is further evidence that civilisation thrived in Peru at the same time as it did in what is now the Middle East and South Asia, said Ruth Shady, a prominent Peruvian archaeologist who led the team that discovered the ancient city of Caral in 2001.
Shady serves as a senior adviser to Peru's National Culture Institute and was not involved in the project.
The find also raises questions about what prompted "civilisations to form throughout the planet at more or less the same time," Shady said.
The circular, sunken plaza, built of stones and adobe, is part of the Sechin Bajo archaeological complex in Andes foothills, 330km northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archaeologist Renate Patzschke have been working since 1992.
Thoughts about the world
It predates similar monuments and plazas found in Caral, which nonetheless remains the oldest known city in the Americas dating back to 2627 BC.
The plaza served as a social and ritual space where ancient peoples celebrated their "thoughts about the world, their place within it, and images of their world and themselves", Fuchs said.
In an adjacent structure, built about 1800 BC, Fuchs' team uncovered a 3 600-year-old adobe frieze - two meters tall - depicting the iconic image of a human sacrificer "standing with open arms, holding a ritual knife in one hand and a human head in the other", Fuchs said.
The mythic image was also found in the celebrated Moche Lords of Sipan tombs, discovered on Peru's northern coast in the late 1980s.
Walter Alva, the Peruvian archaeologist who uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs, said the plaza found in Fuchs' dig was probably utilisd by an advanced civilisation with economic stability, a necessary condition to construct such a ceremonial site.
Creating civilisation
The excavation was the fourth in a series of digs at the Sechin Bajo complex that Fuchs and Patzschke began on behalf of the University of Berlin in 1992. Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft, a German state agency created to sponsor scientific investigations, has financed the most recent three digs.
The find "shows the world that in America too, human beings of the New World had the same capacity to create civilisation as those in the Old World", Shady said.
Her discovery, Caral, made headlines in 2001 when researchers carbon-dated material from the city back to 2627 BC, proving that a complex urban centre in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt - 1 500 years earlier than previously believed.
- AP
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