Norte Chico built America’s oldest known civilization
Peru’s story stretches some fifteen millennia along desert coast and Andes. Norte Chico, centered on Caral about 2500 BCE, is called the oldest civilization in the Americas. Inca power later filled the southern highlands before Spanish conquest and independence after Ayacucho in 1824.
Hunting tools older than 11,000 years appear in caves at Pachacamac, Telarmachay, Junín, and Lauricocha. By about 6000 BCE coastal Chilca and Paracas and highland Callejón de Huaylas communities shifted toward farming corn and cotton and domesticating llama, alpaca, and guinea pig ancestors. Sedentism produced Caral in the Supe Valley, about 200 km north of Lima—widely treated as the first known city in the Americas, with roughly thirty terraced pyramidal platforms, some twenty meters high, one of the world’s independent cradles of civilization.
Later cultures—Chavín, Paracas, Moche, Nazca, Wari, Tiwanaku, Chimú, and others—rose and fell; coastal societies weakened under El Niño floods and droughts while highland Wari and Tiwanaku dominated between about 500 and 1000 CE. The Inca Tahuantinsuyo, four united regions, peaked in the early sixteenth century from southwest Ecuador into northern Chile and northwest Argentina, with Cusco as capital. Pachacuti first greatly expanded the Cusco state; Quechua became the official tongue, Inti the paramount sun deity, and the Inca Trail with chasqui runners knit the empire. Machu Picchu, about 70 km northwest of Cusco at roughly 2,350 m, was scientifically publicized by Hiram Bingham in 1911 after Agustín Lizárraga’s 1902 visit.
Spanish explorers linked the name Peru to Birú near Panama; the 1529 Capitulación de Toledo labeled the Inca realm the province of Peru. Francisco Pizarro’s party entered in 1532. After conquest the Viceroyalty governed much of Spanish South America. Independence was declared in 1821 and secured only after the Battle of Ayacucho three years later, opening the republican era.
Source: History of Peru
