Rising in Peru’s Supe Valley around 2600 BCE, Caral is the oldest known city in the Americas, built with pyramids, sunken plazas, and no evidence of writing, pottery, or war.

Caral, in the Supe Valley of Peru, is the oldest known city in the Americas — built with pyramids, sunken plazas, and clever earthquake-proof foundations at the very same time as the Great Pyramid of Egypt, yet with almost no sign of war.

In a Peruvian desert, a lost civilization built pyramids at the same time as the Egyptians, with no contact between them. Inside Caral, the oldest known city in the Americas.

On the desert coast of Peru stands a temple whose walls are lined with hundreds of carved stones showing marching warriors and their dismembered victims. Meet Cerro Sechin, one of the oldest and most haunting monuments in the Americas.

A line of thirteen stone towers in the Peruvian desert forms the oldest known solar observatory in the Americas, tracking the sun across the year with astonishing precision over 2,000 years ago.

At a remote river confluence in Peru’s highlands, Chavin de Huantar spread its jaguar gods, hallucinogenic rituals, and sunken plazas across the Andes without ever raising an army.

Long before the Inca, a temple in the Peruvian Andes used darkness, roaring water, carved monsters, and visions to overwhelm pilgrims. Meet Chavin de Huantar and its fanged god, the Lanzon.

Centuries before the Inca, the Wari built roads, terraces, and provincial cities across Peru from their capital above Ayacucho, laying the imperial blueprint the Inca would later inherit.

The Nazca people carved hundreds of massive desert drawings meant to be seen from above, centuries before anyone could have flown over them.