The ruined city of Caral, in the Supe Valley of coastal Peru, is the centerpiece of the Norte Chico (Caral-Supe) civilization, which flourished from around 3000 BCE. It is the showpiece of Caral-Supe / Norte Chico, widely recognized as the oldest known center of civilization in the Americas, roughly contemporary with the pyramids of Egypt and the first cities of Sumer. Its people raised large platform mounds and sunken circular plazas, yet left no pottery and almost no images of war. Its dating, its reputation as a peaceful society, and its place among the world's earliest cradles of civilization are all debated.
Stone pyramids rose in a dry Peruvian valley nearly five thousand years ago, while Egypt was raising pyramids of its own and Sumer was building its first cities. The people who built them used no pottery and left almost no trace of weapons or warfare. For decades the ruins sat unexcavated, dismissed as too plain to matter, until the archaeologist Ruth Shady dated their oldest layers to around 3000 BCE. That single result pushed the birth of civilization in the Americas back more than a thousand years. Caral, in the Supe Valley, turned out to be one of the oldest urban centers on Earth and part of the oldest known civilization in the New World, raised by a people who built monuments before they made a single clay pot.