Archaeologists in Peru Uncover Ancient Moche Pottery Workshops at Cerro Mayal
Archaeologists in northern Peru have uncovered fresh evidence that a small settlement called Cerro Mayal was a major centre of ceramic production for the Moche civilisation — a culture whose finely decorated pottery is among the most celebrated of the ancient Andes, even though the places where it was made have long remained a mystery.
A team from the Chicama Archaeological Programme (Prach), based at Peru's National University of San Marcos, began new excavation work at the site, which sits in the Chicama Valley in the La Libertad region. The Art Newspaper reported on 12 August 2026 that the digs have yielded discoveries of moulds and potters' plates — the tools of a working ceramics studio — in the upper layers of the settlement. Henry Tantaleán, a co-director of the programme, told the Peruvian news agency Andina that the finds emerged after excavations resumed last year.
The 2026 season is expected to cover 100 square metres, making it the largest archaeological investigation ever carried out at Cerro Mayal, according to HeritageDaily, which reported on the excavations on 6 August 2026.
The Moche civilisation flourished on the northern coast of what is now Peru from around AD 100 to AD 800. It was not a single kingdom but a network of independent city-states and autonomous polities that shared a common culture, religion, art and advanced irrigation technology. Their ceramics are extraordinary in their variety — ornate, moulded, and famous for portrait vessels depicting what appear to be actual individuals, as archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter has noted.
What makes the new digs especially vivid is the picture they paint of everyday working life. Last year's excavations uncovered adobe and stone walls alongside possible areas for preparing vessels, suggesting the structures were seventh-century equivalents of live-work studios: people lived where they made the pots. According to a 2024 article in the Peruvian Ministry of Culture's journal Arqueológicas, the Cerro Mayal settlement began its occupation around AD 650.
This is not the first time archaeologists have dug at the site. Glenn Russell and Banks Leonard carried out excavations there in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, and their radiocarbon dating — from what a ScienceDirect article identifies as the Larco Moche IV ceramic workshop — served as the initial reference for dating the site. A Springer Nature academic chapter has also examined evidence of proto-writing, early symbolic marks that may prefigure writing, in Moche pottery found at Cerro Mayal.
The Prach team has now sent new samples to a laboratory in the United States for more accurate dating of pottery production at the site. The results could sharpen a timeline that has relied on decades-old radiocarbon data.
There is urgency behind the work. Cerro Mayal sits on the property of the Casa Grande Sugar Company and has been described as quite unprotected — vulnerable to looting and encroachment. The deeper the archaeologists dig, the more of a fragile production centre they reveal, on land where no one was standing guard.
