Caral Templo Mayor

10.8895°S, 77.5188°W.

The Templo Mayor (Pirámide Mayor) at Caral in the Supe Valley, Lima Region, Peru — the central pyramid of the oldest known city in the Americas, built between approximately 3000 and 1800 BCE. Original base 153 by 109 metres; original height 28 metres on six terraces. Caral's construction date predates the introduction of pottery, the wheel, writing, or metallurgy in the Americas — making it the only known monumental urban civilisation built without any of those technologies. Excavated by Ruth Shady Solís for the Peruvian Sociedad Arqueología from 1994 onward, with radiocarbon dating published in 2001 that pushed the city's foundation date back by 1,500 years and rewrote the chronology of New World urbanism. The site contains six platform mounds, two sunken circular plazas, and residential complexes spread across 60 hectares; the recovered material includes elaborate textiles, gourd musical instruments, condor-bone flutes, and quipu fragments — the earliest documented use of the Andean knotted-string recording system.

The largest pyramid in the oldest city in the Americas, in a civilisation that built it without ceramics or metals.