Panama’s oldest pottery appears at the Monagrillo site

Story: 2500 B.C.E.  |  Last updated: January 10, 0001

Along the tidal flats of Parita Bay, on Panama’s Pacific coast, a small community made a mark that would last millennia. The people who settled at what archaeologists now call Monagrillo — a low, two-ridged mound near the mouth of the Parita River — left behind the oldest known ceramics in all of Central America, along with early evidence of maize agriculture that researchers spent decades searching for.

Key findings

• Monagrillo ceramics: Radiocarbon dating confirms the oldest pottery at the site to around 2500 B.C.E., making it the earliest known ceramic tradition in Panama and in Central America as a whole.
• Maize starch grains: Edge-ground cobbles recovered from the site yielded starch grains characteristic of maize and possibly manioc — a late but significant discovery that had eluded researchers for decades.
• Parita Bay settlement: Occupation of the site spanned roughly 1,300 years, with evidence of seasonal use giving way to more permanent habitation as an offshore bar stabilized the shoreline and reduced tidal flooding.

A community shaped by water

Monagrillo measures just 210 by 85 meters — a modest footprint for such an outsized historical significance. Its two parallel ridges, separated by a central trough, sit along what was once an active shoreline, backed by mangroves, marshes, and the rich mud flats of Parita Bay.

The bay was generous. Archaeological evidence suggests large populations of mollusks, crustaceans, and fish have thrived in its shallow waters for at least 7,000 years. The Monagrillo people made full use of that abundance. Excavations recovered thousands of fish vertebrae — many from sardine-sized species — along with hundreds of crab claws, oyster shells, and clam remains. Researchers believe the site’s occupants used fine-meshed nets and watercraft to harvest the bay.

Deer provided a meaningful secondary food source. Of 97 mammal bones recovered during the 1975 excavations led by Anthony J. Ranere, white-tailed deer accounted for 70%. Collared peccary, agouti, cottontail rabbit, and armadillo were also present — likely hunted from the surrounding plains and foothills, where smaller campsites extended the community’s reach inland.

The pottery that changed the record

The ceramics Monagrillo’s people made were not elaborate. Open bowls and neckless jars dominated the assemblage. The ware was monochrome, somewhat crude, and poorly fired. Decoration, when it appeared at all, involved simple incised meanders and occasional scroll patterns. These were not prestige objects — they were tools for daily life.

But their age is what matters. The oldest Monagrillo ceramics have been reliably dated to around 2500 B.C.E. No earlier pottery has been found anywhere in Central America. The invention of pottery across different world regions allowed communities to store, cook, and transport food in ways that reshaped daily life and long-term settlement patterns — and Monagrillo’s people were part of that global story, developing their own ceramic tradition independently on the Pacific coast of what is now Panama.

The stone tools found alongside the pottery tell a connected story. Choppers, scrapers, and grinding stones were simple, often made from naturally shaped cobbles with minimal modification. This continuity with the earlier, pre-ceramic Cerro Mangote culture — documented nearby — suggests that Monagrillo was not a sudden rupture but a gradual evolution of an already-present tradition.

The long search for maize

For much of the 20th century, the question of whether Monagrillo’s people cultivated or consumed maize went unanswered. During the 1975 excavations, Ranere’s team searched carefully for maize remains and found none. Pollen and phytolith analysis in 1998 also came up empty.

The answer came from an unexpected direction. An edge-ground cobble recovered from just beneath the surface yielded starch grains characteristic of maize, along with grains resembling manioc. A second cobble, from 20–30 cm below the surface, contained palm phytoliths and another maize starch grain. The evidence is limited — the researchers themselves acknowledged that — but it suggests that plant foods, including maize, were part of the diet. The grinding stones were not decorative. They were in use.

This places Monagrillo among the earliest sites in Central America to show signs of maize processing, contributing to a growing picture of how agricultural knowledge spread — and was independently developed — across the Americas during this period.

Lasting impact

Monagrillo’s significance extends well beyond Panama. It anchors the timeline of ceramic production in Central America, giving archaeologists a fixed reference point from which to trace the spread and development of pottery-making traditions across the region. The site also demonstrates how coastal communities could build stable, long-lasting settlements around aquatic resources — a model of subsistence that was widespread across the ancient world but is often overshadowed by narratives centered on large-scale agriculture.

The site’s detailed stratigraphic record — showing the shift from seasonal to permanent occupation as the shoreline stabilized — offers a rare window into how human communities adapted to changing coastal environments over centuries. That kind of environmental responsiveness is a thread running through human prehistory on every continent.

The nearby constellation of sites — Cerro Mangote, Cueva de los Ladrones, Aguadulce Shelter — suggests that Monagrillo was not an isolated community but part of a broader regional network of peoples who moved between coastal and inland environments, sharing knowledge and resources across generations.

Blindspots and limits

The Monagrillo record has real gaps. The evidence for maize and manioc rests on a small number of starch grains from just two cobbles — suggestive, but far from conclusive. The absence of shell artifacts is puzzling given how much shell food waste was recovered, and no one has yet offered a satisfying explanation.

The people who lived here left no written record, and their relationships to other regional cultures, their social organization, and the full scope of their plant use remain only partially understood. Major excavations covered roughly 435 square meters of a site that once stretched across 1.4 hectares — meaning most of Monagrillo’s story is still in the ground. Ongoing archaeological work in Central America continues to refine the picture, but slowly.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Monagrillo — Wikipedia

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized at COP30
• Ghana establishes marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory

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