Caral

A city of six pyramid complexes, plazas and houses over 60 hectares in the Supe Valley, occupied roughly 2600 to 2000 BC, which puts it going strong while the great pyramids were rising in Egypt and 1,500 years before the Olmec. It is the oldest known civilisation in the Americas. The main temple is 150 by 110 metres and 28 high. The part archaeologists keep pointing at is what is NOT here: no battlements, no weapons, no mutilated bodies, in sharp contrast to older sites nearby like Sechin Bajo, which suggests a place that ran on trade rather than force. What they did leave was 32 flutes and 37 cornetts cut from bird and animal bone, and early quipu, the knotted-cord record system. UNESCO listed Caral-Supe in 2009. About 182 km north of Lima at 350 metres.