Qualla: Ancon (archaeological site)

Ancon (archaeological site): Introduction

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daderot, Public domain. In 1870, workers building a railroad from Ancon to Pasamayo broke through the surface and found the dead. Large ancient tombs, packed with textiles and ceramics, emerged from the sandy ground 42 kilometers north of Lima. It was the beginning of a long reckoning with a place that had been continuously occupied for 10,000 years. Ancon is not Peru's most famous archaeological site, but it may be its most complete -- a single location where the entire sweep of Andean civilization, from the preceramic stone-tool makers of the lithic period to the final days of the Inca Empire, left its mark in layered deposits of shell middens, burial grounds, and the ruins of a culture that never quite left.

Image: Daderot | Public domain

Ancon (archaeological site): Ten Thousand Years of Shellfish

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit QM Keen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The earliest inhabitants of Ancon arrived roughly 10,000 years ago, during the lithic period, camping on the pampas of Ancon and Piedras Gordas. They left behind bifacial projectile points of the Paijan type, a style found elsewhere along the Peruvian coast. By the archaic period...

Image: QM Keen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ancon (archaeological site): The City of the Dead

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charles Wiener, Public domain. Ancon's great necropolis, also known as Miramar, is the site's most striking feature -- a vast burial ground spanning multiple cultural periods. Between 1945 and 1950, archaeologist Julio C. Tello conducted rescue excavations ahead of planned development, investigating an area of...

Image: Charles Wiener | Public domain

Ancon (archaeological site): From Berlin to the Bay

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY 4.0. Five years after the railroad workers' accidental discovery, German scholars Wilhelm Reiss and Alphons Stubel arrived in 1875 and began systematic excavations in and around the necropolis. Their work produced a three-volume study, published in Berlin between 1880 and 1887, with d...

Image: CC BY 4.0

Ancon (archaeological site): Where Treaties and Tombs Share Ground

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY 4.0. Ancon is also known for an event that has nothing to do with archaeology: the Treaty of Ancon, signed in 1883, which ended the War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile. The beach resort area sits at the northern edge of Lima's sprawl, west of the Pan-American Highway, a modern t...

Image: CC BY 4.0