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Scientists discover oldest Peruvian monument

The ruins of Sechin Bajo, built 5,500 years ago, are pictured after their discovery in Casma, Peru, earlier this month. PHOTO: REUTERS

A team of German and Peruvian archeologists said they discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5,500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast.

Carbon dating of material discovered at the site revealed it was built between 3500BC and 3000BC, Peter Fuchs, a German archeologist who headed the excavation team, said by telephone on Monday.

The discovery was further evidence that civilization thrived in Peru at about the same time as it did in what is now the Middle East and South Asia, said Ruth Shady, a prominent Peruvian archeologist 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.

QUESTIONS

The find also raises questions about what prompted "civilizations 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 archeological complex in Andes foothills, 330km northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archeologist Renate Patzschke have been working since 1992.

It predates similar monuments and plazas found in Caral, which nonetheless remains the oldest known city in the Americas dating back to 2627BC.

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.

ICONIC

In an adjacent structure, built around 1800BC, Fuchs' team uncovered a 3,600-year-old adobe frieze -- 2m 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 archeologist who uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs, said the plaza found in Fuchs' dig was probably utilized by an advanced civilization with economic stability, a necessary condition to construct such a ceremonial site.

DIGS

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 civilization 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 2627BC, proving that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt.

This put such activity in the Americas 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.
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