Anthropologists' research unveils early stone plaza in the Andes

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

by University of Wyoming



A team including University of Wyoming anthropologists works at the site of a circular plaza that was built around 4,750 years ago in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru. Credit: Jason Toohey


Two University of Wyoming anthropology professors have discovered one of the earliest circular plazas in Andean South America, showcasing monumental megalithic architecture, which refers to construction that uses large stones placed upright with no mortar.

Located at the Calla cpuma archaeological site in the Cajamarca Basin of northern Peru, the plaza is built with large, vertically placed megalithic stones—a construction method previously unseen in the Andes. Associate Professor Jason Toohey, project lead, and Professor Melissa Murphy have been researching this topic since the project's inception in 2015. Excavations took place in the plaza starting in 2018.

Their paper, which reports new data on this earliest known megalithic circular plaza in the northern Andes, is titled "A Monumental Stone Plaza at 4750 BP in the Cajamarca Valley of Peru" and has been published in Science Advances.

Radiocarbon dating places its initial construction around 4,750 years ago during the Late Preceramic Period, making it one of the earliest instances of such architecture in the Americas.

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"This structure was built approximately 100 years before the Great Pyramids of Egypt and around the same time as Stonehenge," Toohey says.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-anthropologists-unveils-early-stone-plaza.html