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Almost 5000 years ago, ancient Peruvians built monumental temples and pyramids in dry valleys near the coast, showing that urban society in the Americas is as old as the most ancient civilizations of the Old World
BARRANCA, PERU-A few miles northeast of this small fishing town, the Pan- American Highway cuts through a set of low, nondescript hummocks in the narrow Pativilca River valley. If they were so inclined, the truckers thundering along the road could spot on the hillocks the telltale signs of archaeological activity-vertical-sided cuts into the earth surrounded by graduate students with trowels, brushes, tweezers, plastic bags, and digital cameras.
The Pativilca, about 130 miles north of Lima, is one of four adjacent river valleys in the central Peruvian seacoast known collectively as the Norte Chico, or Little North (see map, p. 35). Pinched between rain shadows caused by the high Andes and the frigid Humboldt Current offshore, this is one of the driest places on earth; rainfall averages 5 cm a year or less. Because of the exceptional aridity, ancient remains are preserved with startling perfection. Yet the same aridity long caused archaeologists to ignore the Norte Chico, because the region lacks the potential for the full-scale agriculture thought to be necessary for the development of complex societies.
Then in the 1990s, groundbreaking research directed by archaeologist Ruth Shady Solis of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos established that such societies had existed in the Norte Chico in the third millennium B.C.E., the same time that the Pharaohs were building their pyramids (Science, 27 April 2001, p. 723). And in the 23 December issue of Nature-in what archaeologist Daniel H. Sandweiss of the University of Maine at Orono describes as "truly significant" work-archaeologists Jonathan Haas of the Field Museum in Chicago and Winifred Creamer and graduate student Alvaro Ruiz of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb reported the startling scope of the Norte Chico ruins, which include "more than 20 separate residential centers with monumental architecture," and are one of the world's biggest early urban complexes. The ruins are dominated by large, pyramidlike structures, presumably temples, which faced sunken, semicircular plazas-an architectural pattern common in later Andean societies. The new work includes 95 radiocarbon dates that confirm the great antiquity...