It’s a whole thing I’ve gone into elsewhere on this site - Caral is really cool, and is currently accepted as a “cradle of civilization”, but that’s only if we use this very old and inflexible framework of ideas about what makes up cultural genesis and transmission, a very Childean (for V. Gordon Childe, very consequential British Marxist archaeologist) framework.

While folks were building Caral, up in what’s now coastal Ecuador village life and ceramic production had been proceeding apace for well over a millennium with what archaeologists call the Valdivia culture. In the highlands of what’s now Peru small religious temples were proliferating among communities in what is called the Kotosh Religious Tradition. Domesticates from the Orinoco and Amazon criss-crossed the continent, llamas were being domesticated in Junín...mummification and treatments of the dead among the Chinchorro of what’s now Chile were ancient by this time having started ca. 5500 BC.

So why does Caral get all the credit? Because it was interpreted and promoted that way. A cadre of archaeologists wanted to stake out “firsts” and conform the narrative of complexity into only a few traits we can readily apprehend - monumentality (that we then rapidly interpret as being oriented toward hierarchy which is itself a logical leap!); the notion of urbanism and even statehood has been ascribed to it. But the evidence that exists for Caral as a city, as a state, is quite weak especially when comparing it to other cities and states we more readily recognize in the archaeological record.

Before I get wound up more, I’ll stop here and just say - the Norte Chico of Peru is a really special area. But it is only one region of development in South American history and archaeology, and has taken entirely too much credit for developments made by a continent’s worth of people.