Caral-Supe. Just Amazing.

Text by Kristopher Schmidt; Photos by Kristopher Schmidt and Katie Shank

What a privilege to work and study abroad.  What a lot of stress it is to work and study abroad.  Living is Lima is really tiring.  Every sign you see is a mini language challenge.  Getting a bottle of water feels like a high stakes multiple choice question.  What brand?  Warm or cold?  Sin gas o con gas?  Crossing the street succesfully in this busy city feels like a real victory sometimes.

To give our students a little break from the busyness of Lima we decided to take them a few hours North to one of the oldest cities in the Americas.  We took a two hour bus ride out to Caral-Supe to visit an ancient site that was a city home to 3,000 inhabitants, about 5,000 years old, older than the handing down of the ten comandments.  This week our focus was Archaeology and Pre-Inca societies.  So many people associate Peru with Machu Picchu and the Incas, and few recognize that this place has been inhabited for thousands of years.  There’s even strong evidence of hunter-gatherer communities dating back 12,000 years.  This trip was a chance for us to become acquainted with these early people and to connect ideas we learned through two lectures on the Pre-Inca communities and two museum visits (Museo Larco and Museo del Banco de la Reserva).  Our visit to Caral-Supe was visually rich, very hot, and fascinating over all.  Students enjoyed this once of a life opportunity and are really excited to visit Machu Pichu next week (Next Week?!).

Part of our visit to Caral-Supe involved staying at Albufera Medio del Mundo, a collection of bungalows near a lagoon that is home to a wide variety of birds that live near the sea.  Our goal was to explore some of the natural world aspects of Peru.  We saw many different species of birds and also enjoyed a tour of the restoration projects underway in the region as well as a successful tilapia farm.  Our visit to this site provided us with some great sharing time in a beautiful setting and some significant downtime at the beach.

Enjoy some of the pictures below.  Our students are doing well.  Many rich friendships are continuing that began on campus before arrival on SST, and some are just developing here.