Sechin Bajo, the ceremonial plaza of 5,500 years in Peru is still waiting to be published

 Ancient ceremonial plaza found in Peru
By ANDREW WHALEN, Associated Press Writer 

LIMA, Peru – A team of German and Peruvian archaeologists say they have discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5,500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru’s north-central coast. Carbon dating of material from the site revealed it was built between 3500 B.C. and 3000 B.C., Peter Fuchs, a German archaeologist who headed the excavation team.

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 archaeological complex in Andes foothills, 206 miles northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archaeologist 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 2627 B.C.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.In an adjacent structure, built around 1800 B.C., Fuchs’ team uncovered a 3,600-year-old adobe frieze — six feet 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 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 2627 B.C., proving that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt — 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.