New research at an archaeological site in northern Peru that had been abandoned for three decades has revealed fresh evidence that the location served as a major centre of ceramic production for the Moche civilisation.
The Andina news agency reported thata team from the Chicama Archaeological Programme (Prach) of the National University of San Marcos has begun excavation work at the Cerro Mayal archaeological site, a small settlement located in the Chicama Valley, in the La Libertad region, known for its concentration of Moche pottery workshops. The Moche civilisation consisted of a network of independent city-states and autonomous polities in the desert that shared a common culture, religion, art and advanced irrigation technology. It spanned much of the northern coast of what is now Peru, from around AD100 to AD800.
According to archaeologist Jeffrey Quilter, Moche pottery is some of the most varied in the world, whose distinguishing features include ornate decoration and the use of moulding technology. The civilisation is specifically known for its portraiture pottery, which often represents actual individuals.
The archaeologist Henry Tantaleán, a co-director of Prach, told Andina that since digs at Cerro Mayal resumed last year, they have yielded discoveries of moulds and potters’ plates in the upper layers of the site.
Archaeologists at the Cerro Mayal site in Peru have identified ceramic production waste and other materials linked to Moche pottery workshops that were active the seventh century Courtesy Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos/Programa Arqueológico Chicama
“This season, we are finding more moulds, especially figurine moulds, and we are also finding potters’ plates and numerous waste products from the ceramic manufacturing process,” he Tantaleán Andina. The initial layers of the site, he said, are covered by a great deal of ceramic production waste, confirming the settlement's artisanal and pottery-making history.
“The ceramic production sites are much less known than the Moche pottery itself,” he added. “That’s why our interest lies in understanding more deeply how these workshops functioned.”
During last year’s excavations at Cerro Mayal, walls built with adobe and stone were discovered, in addition to possible areas used for preparing vessels, suggesting the structures were seventh-century equivalents of live-work studios. “We have been able to determine that people lived in the workshops,” Tantaleán said. “Now we want to better understand how the workspaces of the Moche potters were organised.”
Previous excavations at the site were carried out in the late 1980s and mid-90s by the archaeologists Glenn Russell and Banks Leonard, whose radiocarbon dating served as the initial reference for Cerro Mayal. The site is located on the property of the Casa Grande Sugar Company and at risk of looting and encroachment.
“It’s a site that has been quite unprotected,” Tantaleán said, emphasising that the project’s objective is to gather as much information as possible about the Moche society and its ceramic production, and to improve the dating of pottery production at the site. While the team that worked at the site in the 1990s identified six dates of use, around the seventh century and the Moche Phase IV era (the fifth and sixth centuries), that era’s carbon-dating techniques were far less precise than what is possible now. The Prach team has already sent new samples to a laboratory in the United States to obtain more accurate radiocarbon dates.
“By reducing the dating uncertainty, we will be able to correlate this Cerro Mayal site with other Moche sites in the valley,” Tantaleán said.
A view of the Cerro Mayal site in Peru's La Libertad, where archaeologists from the National University of San Marcos have identified structures linked to Moche pottery workshops that were active in the 7th century Courtesy Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos/Programa Arqueológico Chicama
José Miguel Pérez-Gómez, a Caracas-based archaeologist researching cross-regional interaction between Andean and Amazonian cultures, tells The Art Newspaper that the renewed excavations at Cerro Mayal are significant for their potential to illuminate “one of the least understood dimensions of Moche culture: the people and social mechanisms behind its extraordinary ceramics”.
Moche ceramics are among the richest visual traditions of the ancient Americas, Pérez-Gómez says, spanning mould-made vessels, stirrup-spout bottles, sculptural portraits and remarkably delicate fine-line paintings of warriors, captives, animals, plants, ritual performances, supernatural beings and elaborate narratives. Predominantly red-on-cream, these objects have become “an extraordinary visual archive for reconstructing Moche ideology and society”.
“We know far more about what Moche ceramics depict than about the communities that produced them. Cerro Mayal may help reverse that imbalance,” Pérez-Gómez adds. “The fundamental questions now concern the complete chaîne opératoire: where potters obtained clay and pigments; how moulds were created, copied and circulated; how vessels were formed, painted and fired; how labour was organised within workshop-households; and whether artisans worked independently or under elite patronage. Recent technological research elsewhere has already demonstrated that apparently standardised Moche production can conceal considerable technical diversity.”
The new radiocarbon dating should help contextualise production at Cerro Mayal with sites elsewhere in the Chicama valley, and in the nearby Moche and Jequetepeque valleys.
