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Comment by TSiege

3 days ago

This site (~1475 BCE) is older than the Olmecs (1200-400BCE) and is associated with another city, Caral, which is even older than them (3000-1800BCE) and both are much farther south than Mexico is compared to the Bering Land Bridge.

Caral at 5000 years old is quite old! For additional context the Pyramids of Giza are ~4600 years old and Stonehenge is ~5100 years old. Given that it's in Peru this does not counter your narrative. But Archaeology is a Science and they cannot definitively say there is an older city without discovering it. It also might be unlikely to find what would be qualified as a "City" that is older. We've certainly found much older human settlements in the Americas, but megalithic building and cities is harder to say. Perhaps we'll find packed earth ones somewhere, but Peru really did have the jump on what would term "complex societies" in the Americas

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TSiege

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dmix  2 days ago

> Complex society in the Caral–Supe arose a millennium after Sumer in Mesopotamia, was contemporaneous with the Egyptian pyramids, and predated the Mesoamerican Olmecs by nearly two millennia.

MangoToupe  3 days ago

> Archaeology is a Science

Archaeology is a collection of arbitrary-but-largely-agreed-upon definitions. That doesn't make it a science. The entire focus on whether or not this is a civilization (or indeed why such a determination matters) is a great example of why you should abandon consensus at the door.

  • AlotOfReading  2 days ago

    I'm not sure you've ever seen multiple archaeologists in a room together if you think they agree on definitions, or that agreeing on definitions is sufficient to end their arguments.

    Usually we say archaeology is a "big tent" field, where anything that's useful can find a place rather than relying on prescriptive definitions of what should and shouldn't be used. If this gives you flashbacks to Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism, you've got the idea.

    There are definitely scientific things within archaeology and many archaeologists who spend their days doing activities indistinguishable from what goes on in adjacent geology and biology labs. It's not uncommon for archaeologists to hop back and forth from the biology and anthropology departments either. There was even a movement called processualism in the 50s-70s to fit archaeology within the scope of a traditional science that's widely regarded as a failure.

    Of course we would also have to ask what a science is. The traditional hypothesis->experiment "scientific method" is used in archaeology, but doesn't really apply to historical events. We can generalize that a bit to the Cleland's "smoking gun" idea for historical sciences (so we don't need to fully throw out popper) and indeed it's quite a popular perspective today for the "best" way to do archaeology. It's just not the the totality of methods used by the people we call archaeologists.

    • MangoToupe  2 days ago

      I don't disagree on any particular point; i just dislike the dismissive attitude writing off archaeology as a science.

  • oneshtein  3 days ago

    I was very surprised when I saw ancient cement kiln in Peru, very similar in size and technique to freshly built one (20 years ago) near to my parents town, but labeled as «a religious structure fit with stones».

    As I see here[0], cement stucko on top of natural stone was pretty popular technique back then.

    [0]: https://odysee.com/@hiddenincatours:3/megalithic-saqsaywaman...