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Sacred City of Caral - Supe

Peru (Latin America and the Caribbean)

Date of Submission: 08/02/2005
Criteria: (i)(ii)(iii)(iv)
Category: Cultural
Submission prepared by:
Instituto Nacional de Cultura del Perú
Coordinates:
77º 31’ 32’’ W10º 53’ 54’’ SThe Sacred City of Caral is 182 km north of Peru’s capital city, Lima
Ref.: 2011

Description

The construction of the Sacred City of Caral by the society of Supe started five thousand years ago, during the Late Archaic Period of the Central Andes (3000 - 1500 B.C.), and the city was occupied for approximately one thousand years.

At that time the Supe society, which had reached the level of a state, built eighteen settlements along the Supe valley; these can still be seen today, with different degrees of conservation. Among them, the Sacred City of Caral stands out for its design, scope, and state of preservation.

The Sacred City of Caral is a planned city, with a distinguishable nuclear area and peripheral area. The former contains monumental architectural structures, two distinctive residential groups, residential units for the elite, two sunken circular plazas, and meeting places for a mass public. The peripheral area has many housing units grouped like an archipelago or “islands” of housing, the length of the terrace that borders the valley’s cultivated land.

In the nuclear part of the city, the buildings are distributed over the two rough “halves” of this area. In the higher half we find the six greater pyramids, located around a large open space, among which the Greater Temple predominates, with surrounding housing for the civil servants, as well as a more extensive residential complex. In the lower half there are smaller structures, aligned along an east-west axis, including the Amphitheater Pyramid and a less extensive residential group. Generally speaking, the main buildings as well as the housing for the civil servants were made of stone blocks, plastered with clay, and painted white, yellow or red depending on the period of occupation of the city. The other public buildings were raised by means of stone terraces, on which rooms were built with walls of plant material covered with clay and painted. The residential groups were also built with frames of plant material covered with clay.

The Sacred City of Caral was one of the first cities constructed in the Central Andes and in the Americas. It is also evidence of the birth of civilization and of the formation of state-level social organization in the New World, achieved in isolation, without any contact with civilized societies in other parts of the world.