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Newsday.com - Ancient Peruvian Site Studied The evidence of Caral puts into question what had been accepted until now," said Ruth Shady, a Peruvian archaeologist from Lima's San Marcos University who has led the excavation of the site.

"The splendor of Caral -- 2,600 years before Christ -- is contemporary to the splendor of the Egyptian pyramids, the pyramids at Giza, and the cities in Mesopotamia."

Since 1994, Shady and a team of archaeologists have sifted through dunelike mounds on this desert plateau overlooking the Supe River valley, 90 miles northwest of Lima, in what could be the cradle of civilization in the Americas.