Caral’s first rulers must have been supremely obstinate. To build a city on a continent that may never have seen one before, to create a community out of mud and cobbles and hand-hewn boulders in the grimmest of deserts, required an almost unimaginable toughness and determination. The abandoned settlement, 120 miles north of Lima, Peru, is a vast sprawl of platform mounds, sunken circular plazas, and hivelike living quarters, encircled by gray crags and windblown sand. Few urban settings are grander, or less welcoming.
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Peruvian archaeologist Ruth Shady Solís, advancing the theories of Michael Moseley of the University of Florida, argues that Caral grew out of a fishing society many miles away. Further, she believes her opponents (and onetime collaborators) stole her ideas—as well as her thunder. |
Lately, however, Shady has been embroiled in the fiercest battle of her career—one that may someday lead to the rewriting of human history. Her opponents are her former collaborators, Chicago-based husband-and-wife archaeologists Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer. Her most formidable ally is archaeologist Michael Moseley, at the University of Florida, whose thinking has long dominated discussions of how ancient South Americans made the leap from subsistence fishing to urban sophistication.
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On the other: American archaeologists Winifred Creamer and Jonathan Haas, who are married, believe the ancient city of Caral was part of an agricultural society that expanded to the coast. As for Shady’s plagiarism charges, they say weak journalism led to misunderstandings in print. |
Hostilities commenced four years ago, shortly after Shady, Haas, and Creamer collaborated on a paper in the journal Science reporting that radiocarbon dating showed Caral to be the earliest known urban center in the Americas. Spread across 160 acres of the Supe Valley, the deserted city was 4,600 years old—contemporaneous with Egypt’s earliest pyramids and eight centuries older than any comparable community in the New World. Caral’s massive structures, the three researchers wrote, dated back as far as 2627 B.C. Peruvians had not yet discovered metal; it would be another 600 years before they learned to make ceramic pots. Yet the settlement, which endured for nearly a millennium, had attained an astonishing degree of social complexity. Along with the monumental architecture there was evidence of a class system, labor specialization, and organized agriculture. Seventeen lesser sites in the valley appeared to reflect Caral’s influence. So did other Peruvian polities, as far-flung as the Andean highlands and the Amazon basin, right up to the time of the Incas. Pre-Columbian civilization seemed to have started here.
The Science story received wide play. In her native country, where Shady was already something of a celebrity, the publicity only added to her lore. But in the United States—and thus in the international press—Haas and Creamer received most of the attention. News items portrayed the couple as if they had discovered the site, when in fact they simply arranged carbon datings after a trip to the area in 2000. Shady, who was the first to realize Caral’s importance, and who had labored for years to unlock its secrets, was often treated as a supporting player. Because of this, her relations with the Chicago archaeologists soured, and she refused to speak to them.
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Graphic by Don Foley Amphitheater Pyramid Overshadowed by the dispute over how Caral started is the mystery of why it ended. Archaeologists have found no evidence of an invasion or a rebellion. Instead, city residents systematically covered over plazas, pyramids, and other buildings with gravel and pebbles 3,800 years ago and then left. Their efforts, plus the region’s dry climate, helped preserve such buildings as the 36-foot-high Amphitheater Pyramid, which was apparently used for religious functions. A set of 32 flutes was found on the flat area surrounding the circular amphitheater. Other musical instruments, including 37 horns, were found elsewhere in the 130,000-square-foot stone-and-mortar structure. |
Last December, Haas and Creamer again made headlines with a paper in Nature that presented carbon datings for 13 sites with platform mounds and residential complexes in river valleys near Caral. Some appeared to be even older than Caral, with dates as early as 3200 B.C. “It is now clear,” the couple wrote, that Caral and other Supe Valley sites “were parts of a much more extensive cultural system that reached across at least three valleys and an area of 1,800 square kilometers.” They called the region the Norte Chico, a colloquial term for the north-central coast of Peru. And they mentioned Shady only in their footnotes.
Shady responded by accusing the couple of plagiarism. They had no right to present their analysis as original, she claimed, since she had long portrayed Caral as part of a larger system in her scholarly writings. “Haas and Creamer are violating not only my intellectual rights as an archeologist, but also the rights of a Peruvian research project whose authorship they intend to expropriate,” she wrote in a widely published statement. She lodged complaints with the Society for American Archaeology and with Haas and Creamer’s employers, the Field Museum and Northern Illinois University, respectively. Although the society declined to get involved (“We don’t have mechanisms for settling those kinds of disputes,” says a spokesman), the other institutions launched investigations. In Peru the National Institute of Culture, which issues excavation permits, asked the professional association for the country’s archaeologists to hold hearings on the dispute. The minister of foreign relations instructed the Peruvian embassy in Washington to raise the issue officially. The mayors of towns near Caral issued a proclamation denouncing Haas and Creamer’s “piracy.”
Some North American archaeologists praised the Nature article. Anthropologist Craig Morris, of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, hailed Haas and Creamer’s work in The New York Times as “a very important beginning.” But others were highly critical of their compatriots. Betty Meggers, director of Latin American archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution and a friend of Shady’s, sent a letter to the National Geographic Society (which partially funded the couple’s work) titled “Unethical Behavior of Grantees Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer.” Michael Moseley told the Associated Press that Haas and Creamer were creating a “detrimental” situation for “many who have worked down here for many, many years and tried to develop good relations.” Haas and Creamer fired back, saying their work was being “slandered by people who don’t want to take time to look into it. Not one of those allegations is true.”
A century ago, in archaeology’s barnstorming days, personal vendettas were commonplace. But the Society for American Archaeology board president, Ken Ames, is nonplussed by the dustup. “This kind of accusation is quite rare,” he says. “Archaeologists fight all the time, but we fight over ideas.” Yet a visit to the disputed valleys reveals that this feud actually is about ideas, not just hurt feelings. It’s about two of archaeology’s fundamental questions: How does a civilization get started? And did it begin differently in the Americas than everywhere else?
To understand the terms of the debate, it helps to tour the garbage dump at Supe Puerto, a grimy harbor town about 20 miles northwest of Caral. The dump covers an expanse of sand dunes, one of which has a crater at the top. In this depression may be found a number of artifacts whose archaeological significance seems doubtful: newspaper pages from 1985, the skeleton of a small dog, a warped 45-rpm record of Sixto Morales singing “El Alma de la Fiesta.” But beneath the trash-strewn sand lies the main pyramid of a settlement called Aspero.
Archaeologists first visited Aspero in 1905, but they mistook its ruins for natural hills. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that Moseley, then at Harvard University, and his former professor Gordon Willey confirmed that the 32-acre site was a preceramic fishing settlement with six platform mounds. In those days, few scientists believed that monumental architecture existed in preceramic times (before 1800 B.C.); sites with platform mounds but no pottery were regarded as puzzling anomalies. And if Peruvians did build pyramids before they fired clay, it seemed unlikely that early coastal dwellers would have reached such a degree of sophistication. It takes a fairly complex society to undertake big public construction projects, and the consensus was that complexity sprang from mastering agriculture. Hunter-gatherers had neither the means nor the need to create social hierarchies. That process (which entailed the division of labor and the emergence of a managerial caste) got under way only after humans settled down to farm. Once they learned to grow enough food to nourish those not directly involved in its production, it was not far to civilization—broadly defined as a society endowed with government, social classes, urban centers, extensive trade, and widespread cultural influence. Fishermen, experts agreed, were really foragers, and their way of life offered no incentive to organize.
To Moseley, however, Aspero was evidence that fishing could be a civilizing pursuit. Peru’s coastal desert, which stretches well into the Andean foothills, gets less than an inch of rain a year; there is little natural vegetation. Without irrigation, agriculture is possible only in narrow patches of river valleys. Yet humans have occupied Peru’s coastline for 12,000 years. What drew the first nomadic bands seems to have been the bounty of anchovies, sardines, and other small fish brought close to shore by the cold Humboldt Current and the tons of bivalves at the ocean’s edge. Even today, these waters are among the richest in the world.
Food surpluses, Moseley reasoned, were possible in settlements like Aspero, at the mouth of the Supe River, once the inhabitants learned to cultivate cotton and to weave it into fishing nets. (That era, known as the Late Archaic or Cotton Preceramic Period, began about 3000 B.C.) Labor specialization would have followed, as some people spent their days fishing, others tending cotton plants, and still others twisting the fibers into nets. Small quantities of fruits and vegetables might have been grown, but the main purpose of farming would have been to bolster the supply of seafood. After a corps of priest-technicians arose to coordinate all these activities, it could have marshaled sufficient labor to raise pyramids to the gods.
In 1975 Moseley published The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization, in which he declared, “The archeological axiom that only agriculture could support the rise of complex societies is not a universal truth.” In Peru, fishermen had reached the very threshold of civilization. Although it appeared that full-blown city-states emerged after 1800 B.C., with the advent of grains and pots to store them in, the crucible of complexity lay on the preceramic coast.
Moseley’s theory, dubbed the maritime hypothesis, was widely regarded as heretical, but it gained credibility after radiocarbon dating proved that Aspero had flourished as early as 3055 B.C. By the mid-1980s, the maritime hypothesis had become the dominant paradigm. Then, in 1996, Ruth Shady—a veteran archaeologist who had spent two years exploring other sites in the area—started digging in Caral, 12 miles up the Supe Valley.
Like Aspero, Caral had been on archaeologists’ radar for decades, yet no one had known what to make of it. Shady agreed with those who thought it was a preceramic site, and her own excavations convinced her that the two settlements were part of the same culture. Soon it became evident that Caral was a true city-state, roughly contemporary with Aspero but far larger and more advanced. “That,” she says, “is when I realized that I had stumbled across a problem that would change the way we perceive history in my country.”
Shady remained loyal to the basic premise of the maritime hypothesis. But as she and Moseley discussed her findings, they agreed on some modifications. The first was that Peruvian civilization was born in Caral and that it emerged far earlier than previously suspected. Furthermore, fishing’s effects could not be viewed in isolation from those of farming and commerce. Caral, Shady theorized, may have started as a colony of Aspero, an agricultural outpost charged with providing raw material for nets. But the new community’s location was one of the easiest places in all Peru to construct an extensive irrigation system. Caral’s residents grew industrial quantities of cotton, along with tropical fruits, beans, chilies, gourds, and wood; they traded these for fish, mollusks, and salt from Aspero and other coastal towns. Caral was also well situated for more extensive trade, with the neighboring valleys and beyond. The city exported its own products and those of Aspero to distant communities in exchange for exotic imports: spondylus shells from the coast of Ecuador, rich dyes from the Andean highlands, hallucinogenic snuff from the Amazon.
